- The name, The Prince Of Seagulls is lifted from the ol’ David Williamson play The Club and happily references that classic Australian pastime of getting stoned and watching our magnificent, feathered friends glide majestically through the glittering afternoon sun. Quite what that has to do with Hanna Silver, Paul Harmon and their debut collaboration I really couldn’t tell you. I guess it is a bit of a trip.

Paul, a producer and member of the band Promise Land met keyboardist and analogue synth aficionado Hanna through her outfit Inverto when he hitched them up to remix a track of his. Together, well, by the evidence of their debut full-length (only very recently crowd-funded and soon to be unleashed upon their enthusiastically pre-paying fans), together they’re just all over the place. In the endlessly referential world bands inhabit today, a good set of influences listed on your Facebook can be all important. That being the case, The Prince Of Seagulls leave the gate very strongly, giving the nod to retro-cheese thieves Quiet Village, jazz-funky soundtrack badass Lalo Schifrin and sweaty Afro-maverick Fela Kuti.

You’ll get all three fairly quickly in the first quarter of this self-titled record. Car Accident lays down a business-like afrobeat rhythm section and overlays it with weird sound effects that sound like the fusion drive firing up on a flying saucer. With all the build it’s a clear opener, although the weirdness is pretty self-indulgent, almost completely distracting you from the funky fire that’s rising up and up. Not really a problem, though. The record seamlessly folds into the oily synth smoothness of Electric Clutch which bears a strong resemblance to the work of the cantina band on Jabba’s sailbarge. With all the brightly tuneful synth work I’m left wondering -as I often am by the band- whether they have a large, unacknowledged debt to krautrock. I think the answer is yes and acknowledged or not, it sounds great.

Melbourne World Edits 1, with its descending, funky scales and whistle blasts is firmly back in afrobeat, providing another no-nonsense bridge into All My Own Stunts. This track sounds less Schifrin and more like some bit of David Holmes’ soundtrack to Oceans’ Eleven that’s never been heard before. The organ riff may well be the biggest selling-point for the whole record. It’s smacked down, with delightful irreverence, on to a pounding house beat and layered up with all sorts of things, before dropping out, coming back and launching into a messy and spacey synth solo that lasts, gloriously, just about forever, before everything is quickly brought home.

Things get a bit weirder from here on in: the crashing instrumental hip hop interlude of After The Fact melts into the ghostly ambience of Introduction. Enter The Prince, takes the eerie atmosphere and drapes it over mid-tempo electro-funk, studding it with samples from The Club, which are a bit too lost in the mix, which is in itself a bit cloudy and indistinct. One of the highlights of this bizarre, back-half collection is the organ-toccata-meets-space-rock of Church Organ Freakout. Entropically 24 Bit has a smouldering, shuffle-rock swagger, and the album’s longest cut, Quincy Wow is devoted to a stunning electro-blues explosion, worthy of Nichloas Jaar’s Darkside.

Prince Of Seagulls is a bizarre, at times disjointed collection which can feel like its creators have been afraid they’d be defrauding their crowd-funders if they didn’t throw in absolutely everything. Never let that stand in your way, there's too much of the good stuff hidden in here. The Prince Of Seagulls is quite a trip and one definitely worth taking.

- Chris Cobcroft.