Listening to Ral Partha Vogelbacher’s latest album, Kite vs Obelisk, one can’t help but wonder how the world must appear through the eyes of Chadwick Bidwell, the impishly creative driving force behind the San Francisco band. If his recordings are anything to go by, you might try twisting everything and everyone you know at skew-whiff angles, then turning them upside down to get some idea. It’s probably safe to say that his fantasy life is alive and well and firing on all cylinders. But given that his previous album (the limited, self-released ‘The More Nice Fey Elven Gnomes Are Hiding In My Toilet Again’ on his own Megalon label) was inhabited by drunken knights, dying kings whose greatest regret is not having read all the math they could read and overworked angels striving to protect the brains of hummingbirds, one needn’t be overly insightful to arrive at such a conclusion.

On Kite vs Obelisk, he casts his imaginative and musical nets wide, and drags in a heaving shoal of weird yet strangely endearing characters to populate a richly diverse musical landscape. There’s ‘Aral Sea Regulars’, a tenderly mournful Will Oldham / Songs:Ohia-style ballad about terrified soldiers on an ancient battlefield awaiting their moment of glory; the Pavementesque slanted and enchanting ‘I’m a Jai Ali Kinda Guy’; ‘Night Stinger in the Night Shade’ – a rocking tale of a taxman who sells his infant son to a dark wraith in exchange for a comfy life; the whimsically macabre ‘Take Me to Your Dacha’, with it’s jingly upbeat tune and black humour worthy of Monty Python; the breezy and surreal ‘Kite Carry Obelisk Over Lake Victoria’; the gentle quirky humour of ‘Walking a Sickly Bobcat South of Your Cedar Infested Estate’; and the dazzling pyrotechnics of ‘Red Hot Tugboat’, plus a half-dozen other songs of equal splendour.

Ranging from stark acoustic to fuzzed out electric guitar and squalling feedback via waltz, frantic folk, syncopated rock and drunken drum machine, and containing lyrical references to the Stones, Palace, the Smiths and Pavement, Kite vs Obelisk almost defies classification.

To flesh out the songs that began their lives as acoustic demos, Bidwell enlisted members of other San Francisco bands, including David Kesler and Tadas Kisielius from Thee More Shallows, Wendy Allen from The Court and Spark and Chris Palmatier and Brian Frazer of Brian_and_Chris. Most of the tracks were recorded by Scott Solter (Tarentel, The Court and Spark).