Orchestra of Spheres are the kind of band who turn up to photo shoots in polychrome pontifical attire and play instruments called “the sexomouse marimba” and “electronic gamelan” (both stolen, it would seem, while on tour in Krakow). They pretend to artistic ingenuity, but theirs is a certain scene: a parched festival field, a sunburned freak0ut, an audience of people alternately too cool to dance and too intoxicated to care how badly they dance.

The components of this scene- the sharp percussion, the errant synths, the fuzzy bass notes, the omnipresent wah wah pedal- don’t ever coalesce in quite the same way on a studio recording. When the spectacle of performance is just as much a part of your project as the music, you’re going to struggle capturing all of that on plastic (or digitally, if that’s what the kids do these days).

The success in recent years of antipodean psychedelic rock would no doubt compel Vibration Animal Sex Brain Music to do something truly radical in order for it to stand out. Opener “Aby”, with its scraping, ticking and knocking, is a quietly raucous and charming introduction to what becomes an album marred by an almost malignant complacency. By far and away the best cuts here are the brisk 8-bit funk jams of “Electric_Company”, and “Kairo”, when the band do actually manage to seem animated and engaged. The looped lashings of screams and yelps that rise and fall through a veritably orgasmic progression on “Mind_over_Might” add a little colour to proceedings. Elsewhere, the monotone numerology of “Numbers” and the forgettable repetitions of “Journey” are of precious little value to the record, and seem content in themselves to make way obediently for further extended improv sequences. For the greater part of Vibration Animal Sex Music, the songs veer too far from captivating the listener, content to revel in anonymous po-faced rhythms.

In the world of music, as in that of the visual arts, it’s just as easy and just as untrue to say that there are no longer any original ideas. With that in mind, though, original ideas are few and far between. It’s difficult to keep reinventing and rejuvenating psych-rock, an abstruse genre that could have died with the end of the 60′s and had many people glad to see the back of it. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing something that others have done, or are still doing, just so long as you go about it in a provocative and arresting manner. Compared to something like the sheer demonic magnitude of Goat’s World Music, this feels hollow and wayward. However intentional and conceptual this may be, it’s never particularly endearing. Vibration Animal Sex Brain Music promises a bestial revolution, but seems only to deliver frustratingly self-satisfied capitulation.