Credit: Found On Internet

Rewind your minds back to the late 1990s. Forget all the terrible, terrible, terrible Britpop guff that was slowly dying a frigid and public death at the time (we’re lookingat you, Cast…) and spare a second to remember Dawn Of The Replicants. Despite plaudits from the late great John Peel, their great brand of wayward indiepop never rocketed them to superstardom, but they continue to pop up every few years with a new album.

Roger Simian , founder member from DotR, has an equally off-kilter outlet for his music in The Stark Palace. Joined by fellow Scot and part-time gravedigger, Cameron Jack, the pair first cropped onto Music Towers’ radar earlier this year with the CroMagnon Man EP. Now they’re back with another: The Lost Women EP.

Opening with the outer-space croon of ‘Your Face’, the duo sway and click Beck would if he scored a second job as resident lounge singer aboard the Mir space station. Then there’s ‘Saw What Your Momma Did’, described as “the jaunty Xmas smash that Captain Beefheart forgot to write”. Music Towers thinks it’s the soundtrack to what Christmas would be like if you were to gatecrash Christmas dinner with that creepy family from ‘The Burbs’. The whole thing is wonderfully a few bats short of a belfry.

Everytime I listen to ‘Cybersonnet’ I hear something different. Alabama 3? Louis Armstrong? T-Rex? I’m not sure if they’re in a musical aquarium that we’re all looking in on, or if it’s the listners in the fishbowl with The Stark Palace gawping at us. The closing instrumental, ‘Las Mujeres Perdidas’, is like The Cure gone spazz-core with Ziggy Stardust. No matter how hard you try to grasp at a frame of reference, a shared touchpoint, anything, The Stark Palace pull away and toss you a new curveball so leftfield that you need to use a passport to get to where it originated from.

Locked away in whatever basement they nest, The Stark Palace have made an EP that is confused at the very notion that trends could even exist, let alone thinks about following one itself.

'The Lost Women EP' by The Stark Palace is out now on Shark Batter Records.