Clark: Sus Dog review – comforting weirdness you can’t get anywhere else

Once AI replaces us all, computers will review autogenerated albums for you – a floating head in a jar – to read. When that blessed day comes, there may be one quiet moment when a laptop cries to itself as it realises what we lost. Not reviews written by meatbags, but albums like this. Music as a measure of human growth, ambition. It’s more than 20 years since St Albans-raised Chris Clark’s Clarence Park debut, and only now has the producer made a vocal album. He says it sprang from the age-old question: “What would it sound like if the Beach Boys took MDMA and made a rave record?”

Thankfully, Sus Dog avoids answering it – dry-mouthed octogenarians arguing about royalties, most likely – and instead creates songs you’ll replay because you can’t get their comforting weirdness anywhere else. Clark’s falsetto, reminiscent of Caribou’s Dan Snaith or executive producer Thom Yorke, is used carefully as a texture that neither distracts nor dominates, counterbalancing the occasionally abrasive electronics. The title track is majestic, and a lively human intelligence animates Alyosha and Clutch Pearlers, wandering free from structure, deploying sunbursts of synths and metallic percussion, nailing melodies into your primitive brain.