Out of this world

Singer Karen O and producer Danger Mouse make a cracking team, while dad rockers Fat Cops have great fun on their eponymous debut release

What a double delight to see the names Karen O & Danger

Mouse together on an album. The fearless frontwoman of New York art rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the prolific producer and creative collaborator in Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz and Broken Bells are kindred spirits for sure, but lesser spotted these days. The most recent Yeah Yeah Yeahs album appeared in 2013 and O’s solo album, Crush Songs, in 2014, while Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, has concentrated more on production work than his own music of late.

These distinctive stylists could be forgiven for feeling out of step with mainstream music as it stands in 2019. The luscious Lux Prima seems to echo down from a past era – just not Brooklyn in the Noughties. This sumptuous suite of astral, ambient soundscapes with soaring, almost choral vocals occupies a similar exotic realm to Burton’s Rome project with Italian composer Daniele Luppi, for which he brought musicians who had once played for legendary film composer Ennio Morricone out of retirement to perform his loving tribute to spaghetti western soundtracks.

The title track is a beatific nineminute epic curtain-raiser, which opens as a heady mantra before settling into a trippy pop croon, akin to Air or Beck in pastoral, psychedelic mode.

Languid strings and wah-wah guitar are applied to the sensual palette along the way. Turn the Light is a slice of mellow cosmic funk with O tripping the light ecstatic, while

Woman is a ballsier missive delivered in her more familiar testifying whoop.

She is simultaneously resolute and seductive on Redeemer, then soars to the stratosphere with her squeakiest soprano notes on Leopard’s Tongue. The ghost of Minnie Riperton haunts the symphonic jazz lullaby Drown, and the duo draw on European chanson for fuzzy torch song Reveries before bookending their revels with the yearning, delicate six-minute space age lullaby Nox Lumina.

It’s a good week for cosmic odysseys, as London trio The Comet

Is Coming – featuring saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, Dan Leavers on synthesizers and drummer Max Hallett – offer an intoxicating cocktail of punky jazz and analogue electronica on their second album.

The throbbing Birth of Creation is overlaid with Hutching’s snakehipped phrasing, sashaying off into a sultry synth-dappled sunset but this is merely a taster for the bass quake and urgent honking of Blood of the

Past, embellished with the dulcet tones of poet Kate Tempest.

In their ever-shifting soundscape, the cleansing ambient balm of

Super Zodiac quickly evaporates, replaced by a fidgety drum’n’sax duet, while Hutchings traces soulful circular patterns against skittering percussion on Timewave Zero and the whole trip concludes with the

blissful incantation of The Universe

Wakes Up.

Fat Cops offer a trip of a different kind, one rooted in the spontaneity of DIY garage and punk. This midlife crisis outfit were formed for kicks by a group of friends old enough to know better – among them Robert Hodgens aka Bobby Bluebell on guitar, Al Murray aka the Pub Landlord on drums, Neil Murray aka Mr JK Rowling on keyboards and Euan Mccolm, columnist of this parish, on guitar, plus Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake on backing vocals.

A sense of fun pervades their eclectic self-titled debut from opener Hot Tub, a primitive paean to soaking in communal bubbles, via freewheeling beat excursion Drink All The Drink, slinky electro

shuffle Hands Up! Get Down! and 60s

garage pastiche I Love Girls (He Loves

Girls) to the rollicking sunshine pop of Dehydrated and the relative sophistication of the Motowninspired Fat City. Fear not for their maturity though - the innuendoladen Voodoo Nightstick preserves the endangered non-pc spirit of rock’n’roll.

This mid-life crisis outfit were formed for kicks by a group of friends old enough to know better