You know how sometimes an overhyped album full of tracks which would sound unoriginal to an fifteen year old NME intern, but which, due to its constant rotation on MTV vanilla / base / 2 / flux / overdrive / dance / mobile / hits, VH1, VH1 Classic and TMF, has sold platinum and won everything from a Mercury to a MOBO, lands in your lap, and surprise, it’s shittier than McCain’s y fronts after half a decade at the Hanoi Hilton?

This is nothing like that.

Zero 7 are a deceptively unambitious band, producing some of the most innovative eclectic chillout since 3D spilled a metric shit tonne of E into the Bristol reservoir in ‘93.

What do they sound like? Imagine a stage show featuring the Carpenters being slow fucked by Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, while Tricky and Jónsi Birgisson on decks get orally serviced by a Debut era Bjork nymphet, and Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe receive Thai massage from a robotic chorus of acoustic synth girls.

Songs like Home, the Pagent of the Bizarre, and People Make the World Go Round, remind you why you used to buy CD’s. It’s as though a temporal rift opened at an ashram in 2045, timeporting a Sweedish pychonaut collective to Mowtown era Chicago, where they’ve been ever since, inventing instruments to try to melt a path to the future.

I’m not kidding, Zero 7 are the shit.