Mona Lisa Overdrive

That's me sold on Trashmonk. Mona Lisa Overdrive contains some of the most unusual, atmospheric, surprising and mystical songs that I've heard in ages. The vocals are knocked back and meaningful, reminiscent of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and Spacemen 3; the instrumentals are rich and tapestried, with excellent indie-guitar mixed in with violins, cellos and a plethora of weird samples and effects.

This is one of those rare albums that is totally unclassifiable because the styles it encompasses are so diverse. In one jump you move from the slow acoustic gentleness of a track like 'Sapphire', which glows incandescently with its own innate symbolism, to the bass-driven, danse macabre-like intensity of 'Amaryllis', a spooky number about the games people play. If there is a unifying theme to Mona Lisa Overdrive, it's a very subtle, almost imperceptible influence, in both philosophy and sound, from the magical country of Tibet. 'All Change', for example, contains crashing sounds from a lama dance festival in Nepal, and vocal chants from a Tibetan monastery, as well as train sounds recorded on the Fez to Tangiers Express.

Mercifully, Trashmonk have avoided that naff, culture-robbing thing which plonks a bit of Eastern mysticism into the middle of whatever, taking only the surface and not the depth. Their music is genuinely transcendental.

Pure spirit. Pure sex.