Colours

Colours, the debut album from Britain's Graffiti6, is as vividly vibrant as both the project's moniker and its album title suggest: an uncategorizable mélange of pop, psychedelia, R&B, and British Northern Soul that fully capitalizes on the soaring uplift of Jamie Scott's emotionally transparent voice and gift for melody and TommyD's irresistible rhythms and inventive production. Songs like "Stone In My Heart," "Stare Into The Sun," "Annie You Save Me," and "Free" are "latter-day psych-soul nuggets, all phased vocals and sunshine melodies given the warp factor," as London's Guardian newspaper put it, while the remainder of Colours zigzags all over the musical map from the folk-soul balladry of "Goodbye Geoffrey Drake," to the spare, gospelinflected feel of "Over You," to the down-tempo sultriness of "Calm The Storm," to the jangly indie-rock vibe of "Lay Me Down." "For me, the unexpectedness of the sound is the whole point," Scott says. "It's fun to mess with people's heads."

The relentless experimentation on Colours reflects the lively imagination of its creators, singer-songwriter Jamie Scott and songwriter-producer Tommy Danvers (who goes by TommyD) — both London-born multi-instrumentalists who began making music together in 2009 and decided to call the resulting collaboration Graffiti6. (A third member, the British artist and illustrator Jimi Crayon, designs all of Graffiti6's artwork and is responsible for their bold logo and Technicolor visuals.)