Chad VanGaalen – Shrink Dust

“Cut off both my hands and threw them in the sand,” sings Chad VanGaalen cheerfully, adding: “Watched them swim away from me like a pair of bloody crabs.” You’re gonna struggle to find a better opening couplet – so dark, so repulsive, so intriguing. It revels in his ability to wrap this decidedly unusual fare in soft, warm sheets of pathos, rendering even his more grotesque lines somewhat beautiful. A nifty trick.

Chad apparently regards Shrink Dust as a country album, which is certainly going to surprise listeners bowled over by the hazy fug of Where Are You – but for all his psych-weirdo tendencies, he’s still looking for the most deliriously fried route to Nashville. There’s a classicist sheen to Weighed Sin’s woe-begotten pedal steel, while the inescapably catchy Evil is pop simplicity personified. What, say, Willie Nelson would make of it is immatieral – dude never once ruminated on the comical beauty of his own severed limbs, so pfft! What does he know? [Will Fitzpatrick]