Trabant – ‘Emotional’ (Southern Fried) Released 18/06/07

Few band biographies can be entirely trusted, but Trabant's self-description of "music made for sweat, neon lights and a world gone wrong" is hard to take issue with. Already huge in their native Iceland (and named after an iconic East German car), 'Emotional' is Trabant's fourth album, and is the sound of experimentation running riot. Counting among their members a scratch DJ and a keyboard player who was formerly in a black metal band, the band refuse to be pinned down to one genre, combining glitchy electronica, bombastic synth-pop and stadium rock, underpinned by irresistible pop hooks. 

The album gets off to a strong start with the driving electro of 'Maria' and 'Nasty Boy', before tailing off slightly with the smoky lounge-piano ballad of 'I Love You Why?', bizarrely interjected with a scratched sample. The sleaze-ballad of 'Pump You Up' follows, any subtlety steamrollered over by Ragnar Kjartansson's overwrought vocal, before 'Galdur' brings back the party mood, an instrumental interlude sounding not unlike a turntablist version of the Legend of Zelda theme music. 

'Emotional Meltdown' is pure 80s balladeering schmaltz, all thunderclaps and echoing snare drum, until it descends into keyboard-filled mayhem towards the end, with a sense that the band are purging some of their extraneous ideas, leaving the way clear for two of the album's melodically strongest and most straightforward songs. 'The One' is a surprisingly understated beats-led pop song (turned into a more overt floor-filler by the Filthy Dukes mix, available from their Myspace page), and the album concludes with the pure power-ballad of 'Arms', an audacious double key change and cheesy guitar solo fulfilling the band's unashamed Queen and Gary Numan aspirations.

The songs on 'Emotional' are occasionally buried under sheer weight of instrumentation, and in an eagerness to cover every genre under the sun ideas are sometimes not given enough room to develop. But in an age of identikit indie, Trabant should be applauded for daring to be outrageous, unpretentious and daring. Unfettered, joyous experimentation is mostly kept in check by an intuitive pop sensibility, and the results are always engaging, often stunning.