From Dylan going electric to Gaga going jazz, there’s always extra interest when an artist changes not just direction but dimension. On first listen, The Felice Brothers‘ latest record comes from somewhere left of left field. Before Celebration, Florida, the band were best known for jaunty country stylings like ‘Frankie’s Gun’ and shuffling, shambling ballads. However, even their more experimental cuts cannot quite prepare you for the extraordinary outburst of shouty hip pop chorus that graces ‘Fire at the Pageant’, a terrific, explosive, junkyard-meets-playground dead-man-walking rumpus; hustling, flustering and abrupt.

Authentic menace, wafts of stolid squalor and Joycean seedy inadequacy thread through the album’s series of reflections on a sick society. For some reason, I am drawn to records that are named for a place – here, the focal point may be a Disney town in the Sunshine State but it’s a loose setting that allows for not only the clearest contrast between the espoused and the lived but also a shot at the hypocrisy of our fantasies. And it isn’t as dramatic a departure as you’d think: some of these are still folk songs at heart, being stories (laced with detail) about ordinary people living in ordinary sin: melancholy vignettes, from a place where appearances deceive. The marriage of the naturalistic and the metaphysical suggested by the record’s opener is as strange as the sea change in the band’s sound it seems to announce.

Preconceptions sufficiently shaken up, second track ‘Container Ship’ is almost as disquieting but – in a low, ghostly way – much more mellow. There are a fair few like this, misty but incisive, a little introspective but fervid all the same, and no less intense than the louder fare.

Of course, the Bob Dylan vocal comparison is as unavoidably valid as ever and most apparent on ‘Oliver Stone’, at least until a radio dial scrolls (perhaps a passé trick post-Ramones, but hey) to reveal a fragment – a sonic glimpse – of old Felice folk. The real difference from previous output is in the orchestration, here much more reliant on drum and bass, synths and samples. Piano-driven ‘Ponzi’, in particular, is startlingly styled, with a Visage-aping synth line springing forth from the syncopated beats to underline more shouting and the FX’d outro vocals. ‘Honda Civic’ is punched along by pinches of big band horns, accordion and auto-tuning, while ‘Back in the Dancehalls’ grafts strained strings and twinkling synth onto textured, heavy percussion.

Though this might all sound extraordinarily overblown, it isn’t, and, aside from being impeccably put together, that’s because it’s so stark and up front. Everything is laid bare and the unusual instrumentation serves only to bring more out of each song, making this not just an impressive record but one that genuinely elevates the band. When the swelling, despairing finale ‘River Jordan’ fades to leave a crashing drumbeat as the only catharsis, their theme’s thorough excoriation is complete. There’s no sleight of hand about Celebration, Florida: just discordant, orchestrated chaos and epic decay.