White Flight is Justin Roelofs is a former member of The Anniversary, a band I've vaguely heard of. The album comes in a beautiful austere-splendid fold-out, all white and rainbows. And it sounds amazing: that electrifying combination of familiar influences and a genuinely fresh sound, something that staggers and leaps to exactly the dreamlands it wants to. This is music from Kansas (!), the press release attests, and it's almost impossible to believe. Much easier to hear the hallucinogenic Oz of Roelofs' visit to Guatemala - the way colours shook his head slanted then straight.

"Deathhands" begins as a swampland of noise, organ, DJ Shadow-style drum breaks. But alongside the brokenfaced weirdness of, say, Frog Eyes, White Flight shows all the singsongy play of The Unicorns (for sure) and early Beck. Raps mixed with yells, stumbles with melodica. If you're in a boat, you're gonna get surf in the face. If you're on a dance-floor, you're gonna slip into a flip, impress all the girls.

"Song for Augustine Pt. 2" is the plainer thing, the pretty-creeping acoustic song that albums like this always need to have. At the end of the track you hear some of the swirl of what's to come, but I love how Roelofs keeps this a secret: there's no 'underlying churn' to the rest of the song. There's just a dozy, doozy, almost Devendra Banhart ditty: psychedelia rendered in different shades of desert-gold.

White Flight is the debut release of Range Life Records, and yeah it is the kind of album that inspires you to start a label. Go go go go go buy it (downloadable is only $7.49) - this is one of the year's best new bands. (MySpace/MfR likes it too)