Higher Authorities - Neptune

The shadowy debut from one of the most intriguing musical collaborations in recent British underground history. Higher Authorities brings together Ade Blackburn and Hartley, the pair at the heart of cult Liverpool art-rockers Clinic, with legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood, the man behind On-U Sound and one of the most distinctive sonic fingerprints in British music. The result is exactly as rewarding and strange as that combination suggests.

Recorded in a rundown house in Crosby, Liverpool that backed onto a park, the ten tracks on Neptune move with a woozy, pulsing energy that draws from krautrock rhythms, cavernous psychedelic space, and Sherwood's characteristically wyrd dub sensibility, shot through with a peculiar sense of Britishness that has been compared to the quirky, sinister atmosphere of a deserted pleasure pier. The spooked, eerie vocals and skeletal organ work familiar from Clinic are all present, but transformed by Sherwood's touch into something more electronic, more submerged, and more deliberately disorienting.

Opener "Another Time, Another Place" sets the tone immediately. "The Clone" simmers with tension and a hefty serving of funk before threatening to collapse entirely. "Monocle Man" features a squelching off-kilter beat that is unmistakably Sherwood's handiwork. "Abracadabra" and "Decades" drift through psycho-ballad territory with intricate synth lines weaving in and out of each other and things randomly appearing and disappearing, which as Blackburn and Hartley note, felt quite apt for the way we live today.

The album's digital release date of April 20th was entirely deliberate. This is proper head music, an old-fashioned headphones album where the devil is in the lo-fi details. Limited to 500 copies on vinyl.