Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records hasn’t made much of a pretence about making things easily approachable for anyone, whether through Team Brick’s free jazz-infected noise or Crippled Black Phoenix’s crashing bleakness. By their standards Anika, a partly Berlin-based sometime political journalist produced by Barrow, is pop, what with its proper rhythms and decipherable words. Not that that makes it easy listening as such, despite the fact that it’s that most culturally suspicious of long player tropes, the covers album.

Interestingly, nowhere in the label bumf or press release is it mentioned that it’s an album of other people’s songs, perhaps due to the deficit in inspiration that suggests. It certainly wears its influences on its sleeve, whether it be classic female-fronted pop or punk-funk. Both at the same time sometimes – reappropriating the Raincoats’ ability to sound like they’re falling apart in a welter of avant-post-punk turns the Carpenters’ ‘End Of The World’ into a dystopian whirlwind.

That Anika’s vocal shares Nico’s blank, deep pitched aloofness helps these songs garner a murky, druggy quality at deliberate odds with some of the source material, as bleak as much of it is. If the concept of starting an album with a version of Twinkle’s 1964 girl group era hit ‘Terry’, with barrelhouse piano solo, seems disarming enough, against electronic percussion effects and with Anika’s blank vocal it becomes the sort of night you wouldn’t want to be heading outdoors anywhere on. Given it’s about a teenage boyfriend dying in a motorbike crash, you’d be locking the windows. Dylan’s ‘Masters Of War’ gets an extensive dub treatment – twice – while the Pretenders’ ‘I Go To Sleep’ is slowed right down, introduced to the late 60s wave of psychedelic electronics pioneers and left to drift in its own piano waltz spaced out narcolepsy. Yoko Ono’s ‘Yang Yang’, not exactly a primary coloured pop hit in its original form, becomes a stentorian critique of power in masculinity aided by a synth noise tweaked to sound like a Black & Decker power tool solo.

Really, what sort of record is this? The dub, electronics and Slits/ESG-like post-punk riddim influences make for an impressively, discordantly spare listen, while the assuredly deadpan vocals and liberal use of reverb take it somewhere much darker. It’s not an easy record to love by any means, but while the delivery and idea has the feel of a one-off curio, it’s an entirely individual work.