Firstly, yeah, that’s what it’s actually called. Colourmusic seem to be the type of band who can’t be seen to just plug in and rock out without adding layers of theorising, reference points and self-imposed oddness – this a band who claim to write based on Isaac Newton’s theory of colour and base rhythms on metronomic sex acts. While the world is already well served by a singularly quixotic, freakout-friendly psych-rock band from Oklahoma – Wayne Coyne is a known Colourmusic fan, too – this debut proper eschews the idea of maintaining one idea to gleefully stride across the genres, knocking down puny structuralism on its way. It’s the sort of album where barely structured noise and ambient interludes coexist with the express purpose of messing with your head.

Not that Colourmusic need the mysteries of mere track ordering to manage that. The reliance on as overdriven fuzzy a bass noise as Colin Fleishacker can wrangle might sometimes lead the sound down certain paths – ‘Jill & Jack (A Duet)’ is Death From Above 1979 in all but name – but drenching parts of songs in something just outside perfect sound creates skew-whiff mystery and layers that reward headphone listening. At times, as with that other band’s Embryonic, it goes all out heavy on digital distortion that plays deliberate havoc with all those theories about dynamic range. Relentless, metronomic rhythm is important too, incessant percussiveness driving on the phasing ‘Dolphins & Unicorns’ past the sci-fi desert its soundscape suggests into something properly psychedelic. Ryan Hendrix’s glazed over vocals are usually treated as another instrument, somewhere in the middle of the mix.

It’s certainly not an album hemmed in by a lack of ideas and possibilities. While they can create a workable underpinning melody, as on the acid road trip rhythmic pop anthemry shapes of ‘Tog’ and the space-rock positivism chant ‘Yes!’, more often it’s as if they’ve pointed their studio at the stars and seen where wild galactic travel (in their minds) takes them. ‘Beard’ races in on frantic hi-hats and walls of distorted guitar beneath which half-mumbled vocals and flashes of found sounds struggle for air. The interlude from pedal frenzy in the middle isn’t so much there for a breather as an opportunity to see if percussion alone can keep up the pace. ‘Feels Good To Wear’ starts with the effect of blaxploitation strings before settling into a hip-swinging groove with with mildly disturbing echo chamber vocals, like Deerhunter gone lover’s R&B. Bradford Cox’s catalogue is exploited more openly on ‘We Shall Wish (Use Your Adult Voice)’, in that it sounds like Atlas Sound collaborating with Brian Eno in Music For Airports mode, switching from complex interlocking over airy synths to exploratory charging guitars. ‘You For Leaving’ mixes glam grooves, righteous gospel backing vocals, psychedelic stomp and handclaps.

Having already burned through ideas and low level frequencies at dizzying rates the prospect of ten minutes plus of ‘The Little Death (In Five Parts)’, which is indeed in five parts, seems daunting but gives the band the chance to really rev up the riffs, full of damaged hooks, whirling ambience and droning, swirling wormholes of sound that leak and escape in various directions. The net effect is commune-dwelling Krautrockers given space effects and ordered to recreate the free jazz and Kevin Shields-inspired bits of Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR. Eventually it becomes too much for them and actual songs take a back seat to three and a half minutes of recorded waves breaking on the shore (‘Whitby Harbour’).

Having a lot of ideas in one album is the most mixed of blessings. On the one hand, better a free flowing imagination than be Liam Gallagher; on the other there’s self-belief tipping over into making music entirely for yourselves, not to mention the memory of the abandoned plains where prog once reigned. Colourmusic avoid all that by making their wild theorising sound like a whole, a low-slung cranked up freakout plunged through plenty of studio layers and aimed directly for the frontal lobes. MGMT spent two albums trying to achieve the noise, confusion and songcraft in imperfect harmony that appears to come to Colourmusic as second nature. If it at least in part feels like a record that couldn’t have happened without Deerhunter, Animal Collective or, yes, the Flaming Lips, at least Colourmusic know how to take those influences and grind them into discordant weird-indie devices of their own.