Hailing from the pretty canal-bound town of Market Harborough, Leicestershire, Black Carrot use the “sounds like” section of their MySpace page to describe themseleves as resembling “a weary ex-boxer, once proud and strong, now feeble and confused. Reduced to eating Hoisin Duck Pizza without the aid of teeth or eyes.” This kind of wilful oddness is, of course, omnipresent on band MySpace pages these days. Hundreds of bands categorise themselves as “easy listening”, “children’s” or “calypso”, as if the joke is either original or hilarious. It is neither.

Somewhat surprisingly, Black Carrot categorise themselves quite acurately as “alternative / experimental / live electronics”. If we want to move beyond these vague terms and nail the band down to a more specific style, we’ll struggle. Reviewing their last album Drink the Black Forest, TLOBF’s own Adam Nelson described them “as one of the few bands who genuinely defy classification, who simply refuse to be pigeon-holed.” This even more strangely-titled followup Milking Scarabs for Dough reinforces that judgement, as Black Carrot manoeuvre smoothly from one bewildering musical expedition to another as the album progresses. A sinister-sounding harpsichord dominates the brief and quietly clattering ‘Magnets’, while ‘The Queen of Protest’ is a sparse, hesitant piano-based piece and ‘Blackmail’ together with ‘The Detonation Tonight Will Be S-Ray-20′ represent the album’s forays into off-kilter rock.

Despite these frequent variations in style, there’s still a great deal of consistency across the twelve tracks. The paranoid-sounding, shaky vocals reappear often, and one distinctive instrumental feature that permeates most of the tracks is the particularly highly-mixed, persistent bass. Lyrically, the album is a rich vein of ideas that are at once nonsensical and somehow beguiling, a fusion of simplistic chants, Carrollian nonsense verse, and pure madness. “Laugh we did, until we cried” Black Carrot proclaim on ‘…S-Ray-20′, “laugh we did, until we almost died”.

Everything changes, though, on the fascinating final track ‘The Top of the Hill’. Over a cyclic bass riff accompanied by echoey guitar licks and mournfully chanted backing vocals, our narrator tells through spoken word the deadly-serious story of shackled-together khaki-clad figures travelling through some hellish location. It’s cryptic and vague, but it’s a deeply intriguing change of pace, a world away from the rest of the album that precedes it. Whilst sometimes definitely enjoyable, Milking Scarabs for Dough is perhaps a bit too self-conciously weird to really thrill. What it always consitently is, though, is interesting and challenging.