Joshua Tree, California has inspired or spawned a bewildering array of evocative works in its time. What's so special about this patch of desert that it causes folks to create stuff like The Joshua Tree by Sexy Bono Plus Three, or The Joshua Tree, about Dolph Lundgren shoots some motherfuckers on account of the "criminal activity"?

This haunting stretch of wilderness, connected via geographical technicality to the suburban sprawl of California, and yet in itself acting as some eerie, timeless, reserve.

At least, that's if the tourist brochures and the album covers and so on are to believed. You don't need The Duke to tell you how much of a lying sonna bitch that Dolph Lundgren can be.

The answer, though, may rest somewhere within the 41 minutes of Music To Start A Cult To, the debut release by Joshua Tree residents Gram Rabbit. These vaguely disco-esque yet subversively disturbing tunes what discuss the Jesus, Satan, Cowboys and Aliens serve to bridge the timeless with the contemporary, the absolute with the transient.

Or some such horse-shit.

The band-name manages to similarly conjure images of Gram Parsons and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the latter accentuated by the female vocalist's moniker. This mix of the familiar and the infuriatingly mysterious serves also to influence the actual content, don't you know?

Most of the time, the idiosyncratic melding of synth-pop melodies and American Gothic subject matter works a treat. Album opener Dirty Horse imagines a meeting between Christ and Lucifer, binding Morricone Spaghetti Western cues and Electronica in a highly appealing manner. Dual vocalists Jesika Von Rabbit and Todd Rutherford harmonise in an initially-disconcerting conversational manner that appears more subtly impressive with every listen. It's enough to make a fella say about "Shit, this is kinda cool, is what."

Cowboy-Up is something of a let-down after such an evocative opening. The chorus is a stomp-along affair what rekindles long-though-exorcised memories of The B-52's, but as a whole the track seems horribly dated, embarrassing even. Trying not to cringe throughout the verses is a particularly dangerous experiment what could, feasibly, result in the listener becoming as pretentious as the listening material.

It's a fairly unrepresentative lapse, though, an isolated example of the ambitions being thwarted by production values what can't support them.

Even this, though, isn't really a viable excuse anymore, when folks like Dizzee Rascal are producing stuff in their bedrooms that blows the hell out of anything produced in any "professional" studio.