Sounding like it was recorded south of Venus in conditions of zero gravity, the aptly-named Flotation Toy Warning might just have produced the UK's finest space age baroque pop album of recent times. It's certainly a sprawling and ambitious vision - indulgent, of course, but also blessed with the sort of inherent inventiveness that maybe always occurs when you play instruments like the unlikely-monickered Domingotron.
On a cold, cruel Earth that currently venerates the luddite talents of Razorlight and their ilk, this makes "Bluffer's Guide to the Flight Deck" a very good thing indeed. Their galactic imagination is apparent from the off. Opener "Happy 13" delivers a statement of intent ("Please leave all shiny objects behind. You won't need them where we're going") before bursting into a chiming interstellar symphony. Strings compete with music boxes and wooden computers to create something like Bowie's "Space Oddity" soundclashing with Primal Scream's "Shine Like Stars". Ladies and gentlemen: we have lift off.
"Popstar Researching Oblivion" is better still. Over a stretched and distorted choir, frontman Paul Carter guides his four fellow Floaters through a delicious brass-laden epic. Coming on all Billy Mackenzie (give or take a few octaves) the sheer scale of ambition is impressive enough. Carter sings the chorus - "Trying, trying to understand it all, just makes your head hurt" - as if counting constellations has overcome him. Again the music falls into pockets of minor key weightlessness before rising in a swelling blast of trumpets.
The trick is to be repeated on "Donald Pleasance" – another brass-and-strings saga where violins wail like sad felines and a general aura of tearful strolls through moonlit Paris is evoked. Carter turns on the pathos with a lyric about "another sad f*ck in the country" and, just when you're wondering what's the connection with the villain with the eye-patch and white cat, he drops the rather clunky pun, "Donald, tell me why pleasance never gets me anywhere anymore?"
Such occasional lapses into zaniness prove the record's only drawback, while "Fire Engine On Fire" parts 1 & 2 lose a couple of stripes just because the influences ("Yoshimi"-era Flaming Lips on the former and Mercury Rev on the latter) are just a bit too obvious. Fortunately, they're soon back on course for "How The Plains Left Me Flat" which throws a dab of chanteuse into the mix and creates a sublime four-minute pop waltz in the process.
Like radio signals cut adrift from an alien spaceship it gently disappears into the ether - a lost memory of how good music can be. Wherever the Toy Warning float to next is awaited with much interest.
