I’ve been try­ing to write a review of Rudi Zygadlo’s amaz­ing debut album Great West­ern Lay­men for the past cou­ple weeks but have been strug­gling with how to describe this opus. It’s an immac­u­lately pro­duced vision, end­lessly inven­tive with com­po­si­tion and sound design and tinged with more than a lit­tle humor. Beyond these words I am not sure how to talk about some­thing that sounds like every­thing and noth­ing I’ve ever heard before.

The fes­tiv­i­ties start up with “Man­u­scripts Don’t Burn,” a slinky num­ber that intro­duces many of the Zygadlo hall­marks: a sing-song, self-harmonized vocal, dirty bounc­ing bass, com­plex synth flour­ishes and intri­cate drum pro­gram­ming. It’s a short track that serves to present an imme­di­ate intro­duc­tion to the may­hem that fol­lows. The low-key vocal on “Some­thing About Faith” lay­ers in a darker ele­ment but the twists and bursts of high-pitched synths are more play­ful, set­ting up a fun­da­men­tal aes­thetic of Great West­ern Lay­men. Zygadlo cer­tainly likes to play with con­tra­dic­tions and expec­ta­tions. Using many of the tell­tale sounds of dub­step, the album has a hard time actu­ally sound­ing like what one would think of as dub­step. For one, the Griz­zly Bear-ish har­mo­niz­ing through­out is not some­thing you encounter in most dub­step, even the vocal-led variety.

One of the names that springs to me when hear­ing tracks like “Laymen’s Requiem” is Frank Zappa. The instru­men­ta­tion is dif­fer­ent, the sounds are dif­fer­ent, but the method­ol­ogy and exper­i­men­tal glee inher­ent is unmis­tak­able. Zygadlo is an artist push­ing elec­tronic music to it’s weird­est fringes. “Per­fect Lust” is a robotic lit­tle lounge sound, full of elec­tric croon­ing and bub­bling blips careen­ing through the smooth low-end and sparse drums. Like­wise, “Filthy Logic” and “Stop/Reject” play with this lighter side, the lat­ter fea­tur­ing elab­o­rate key­board melodies and bluesy gui­tar. “Magic After­noon” fea­tures cas­cad­ing piano play­ing not unlike Craig Armstrong’s clas­sic col­lab­o­ra­tions with Mas­sive Attack.

The darker side has it’s day, too, with “Song of Praise,” a wildly dra­matic gothic hip-hop num­ber. Huge Slugabed-ish bass and lum­ber­ing per­cus­sion per­vade, while Zygadlo puts on his best Fred­die Mer­cury per­sona to har­mo­nize along with the filthy stew. It’s an astound­ing dark and humor­ous track, meant to simul­ta­ne­ously shock and amuse. Lead sin­gle “Reseal­able Friend­ship” still sounds as catchy as ever in this lat­ter half of the album, full of overblown gui­tar and that huge vocal. The sense of urgency in the song is poignant at the same time as it dev­as­tates. Tak­ing the cake for most insane of the album’s tracks is “Missa Per Bre­vis.” An intense sax­o­phone solo takes cen­ter stage, while the bass synth pumps in and out of the fore­ground, cre­at­ing a rocky space for the syn­co­pated gui­tar and vocal ele­ments to weave them­selves a safe path. In the midst of this, the dis­tinct sound of scratch­ing finds it’s way in, lay­ing Zygadlo’s hip-hop love bare.

Fol­low­ing up “Missa Per Bre­vis” is the penul­ti­mate num­ber “The Man in the Duck,” a slow and sad bal­lad. A vocoded Zygadlo laments a story through­out, with only min­i­mal instru­men­ta­tion. At times, you almost think you know where’s it’s going, when the heavy fuzz of a wob­ble bass com­ing in, but imme­di­ately the tracks set­tles down again, never quite lift­ing off. We end Great West­ern Lay­men with a slid­ing heap of free jazz enti­tled “Opi­ate of the Masses,” where ele­ments of all Zygadlo’s var­ied loves con­verge into a sin­gle, inten­tion­ally messy endti­tle. I’m per­son­ally excited to track this artist through the years to come. The cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion on this debut album is the sig­nal of great things to come.