It’s somewhere between midnight and morning.You’ve had a good night but you probably overdid it. Everyone’s either passed out on sofas, wrapped in whatever blankets you’ve mustered, or wending their way home, jackets open and still smiling from the recent memories of good times shared. You’re in that hazy state where you could try to sleep but you’d probably just stare at the ceiling and listen to your tinnitus, mulling over the strangeness that gets in your head in those wee small hours of the morning. You may as well put a record on, a last little bit of pleasure before the hangover bites. Chances are, as the sky turns bruise blue, you’ll pull We Were Drifting On A Sad Song by Sleep Party People from its sleeve and nod knowingly as you drop the needle. That’s right. Perfect.

Like one long, incomprehensible recurring dream retold from nine different perspectives, or perhaps more accurately a series of nine consecutive snapshots of an imperceptible but unforgettable moment of thought, this is a record of the modern strange that deals in vagary, dense atmosphere and unsettling post-everything ghostliness.

Brian Batz’s bedroom project has stretched its shadowy fingers a long way from Denmark and an even longer way from his debut record, a shoegaze trip with math rock leanings that received largely positive notices, to deliver these nine twisted siblings. Backed, at least in the live re-telling of the tale, by a gang of friends in bunny masks, Batz has largely eschewed the post-rock quiet/loud guitar cliché to build an altogether more interesting creature.

Take tracks like ‘Heaven Is Above Us’ – an intergalactic death march which essentially consists of a duet between a piano and an alien voice that’s sad, tender, but always dissociated. Is it the removal of emotional access to the content that makes it so strange and touching perhaps? Mogwai it ain’t. Or how about ‘Heavy Burden’, all psych swells, clean, snow-crisp beats cutting through baffles of loops, synths and unexpected surges of synth and string – it’s a Cocteau Twin treat. Perhaps you’ll enjoy ‘Melancholic Fog’, an orient-inspired piano-prodding ballad with the comeliness of Flaming Lips falling into the Euro-squeal of Mew?

The chances are you’ll adore them all – if you are ready to embrace The Vocal. Throughout almost every track here (there is some let-up on the near-decipherable ‘Gazing At The Moon’, a tribal trancer with a nice sub-plot involving MBV guitar squalls) you have a lead vocal processed to the point not only of inhumanity (it’s shrill, it’s high, it’s layered thick right through the mix) but also lyrical incomprehensibility. While you may grab the occasional word (usually “sleep”, “night”, ”ghost” or similar), this is where the record will stand or fall for most listeners.

The fact is, when presented with songs as archly spine-tingling as ‘Things Will Disappear Like Tears In The Rain’, a (tangerine) dream of a yelping, lurching apocalypse that somehow still maintains a kind of processed cool, it’s hard to not embrace every element of the sonic landscape.

This is, no doubt, frantically otherworldly, persuasively drugged-out gear – except when it’s not of course, as on the full-pelt, arms-in-the-air, A-Ha-embracing arena drum machine firecracker of the title track. You’ll begin to nod sagely at each unexpected yet seemingly entirely interior-logical turn. There’s also the legitimately awe-inspiring gear-shift of opener ‘A Dark God Heart’ (see the video for full effect), one song here that does fall into the post-rock category but in a fresh, heartstring-snapping way.

In a wash of Final Fantasy (the game rather than Mr Pallett) pre-dawn haze, in those unsure moments before the sun hits, after the last cigarette is crushed out and the last kiss had, this is a record that you’ll be wise to allow transport you somewhere quite familiar yet infinitely other, understandable but unsettling, awake and yet somehow at the same time dreaming. That’s right. Perfect.