Album: Soft Hearted Scientists, Wandermoon (The Hip Replacement)

Whimsical psychedelia must be like mother's milk to the Welsh.

Soft Hearted Scientists are yet another band spiritually indebted to Syd Barrett, dedicated to making music with a sense of wonder akin to "the sound of stars flying off the end of a wand". Opener "Mountain Delight" fulfills that remit perfectly, finding them gazing into infinity over a bed of glockenspiel, acoustic and slide guitar. "The Trees Don't Seem To Know That It's September" is jocular British music-hall psych-pop, like long hair curling beneath a straw boater, while "Tornadoes In Birmingham" muses amusingly on how "the weather is altogether stranger than it used to be". But no stranger, surely, than the multi-sectioned "Westward Leading", an epic expedition evoking the "magic dust of an octomyth".

DOWNLOAD THIS: Mountain Delight; The Trees Don't Seem To Know That It's September; Westward Leading