It seems to be a hard and fast rule in life that no matter how quietly I sit, no matter how still I am, the nutters still manage to detect my whereabouts, and track me down.  To be fair, The Sun Paulo are Japanese, a country well known for producing musical loons, but this lot are going to be near the top of the psycho league.

Which, of course, means that Electric Wisdom Sound System is a very good album indeed.  For this, we can largely thank guitarist Taiji Sato, who seems to be the main man behind The Sun Paulo.  After all, it's not often that a band combines metal, jazz of various hues, prog and Latin.  In one song!  And that's just the opening number 'I Against A Speeeeed!'.  Try and imagine if Carlos Santana taken too many E's at an early nineties rave and then recorded his trip.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this is one of the best albums I have heard in a very long time, even if I did have to hold onto the wall several times in the process.  A couple of the tunes don't work but that's inevitable when you're heading way over there, to the place with no safety nets.  I'm not entirely sure how many people out there are looking for a psychedelic, spacerock, funk, jazz fusion, Latin American dance band, but the ones that are will be getting ever so slightly moist once they get a whiff of this.

At times the positivity and life affirming sounds almost got me lumbering to my feet to wave my hands in the air like I just don't care, so infectious are the grooves.  Of course, that's made double tricky when you're trying to air guitar and blow a whistle at the same time to 'Electric Western Part 2; Everybody Get Down'.  The tune where John McLaughlin and Memphis Slim decide to join Kool And The Gang.  As they would.  Then, for no other reason than because they can and want to, The Sun Paulo decide it's time to record a track for The Greatest Chill Out Album In The World Ever, Honest Guv, Part 73.

I've got a funny feeling Saint Julian Cope would approve of this immensely, and that was before I reached their reimagining of Burt Bacharach and Hal Davids 'Close To You'.  Who would have thought a song made famous by The Carpenters would attempt to attain a higher state of consciousness?  I'm not sure Burt would approve, but given his dalliance with Elvis Costello, that's probably a good thing.  Best album of the year so far, by a spaced out hyper mile.