When you think about it, the Cassandra of Greek legends and the Lorax of Dr. Seuss’s canon are the same character. Sort of. I mean, OK, one was a human who foresaw the fall of Troy, while another was an orange fuzzy ball that tried to stop an industrialized city from destroying the earth. But you see what I mean – when prophets in literature try to ward off certain destruction, no one believes them.

Now, where am I going with this? Our subject today is LUMP, the anthropomorphic furball between Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay. Neither of those folks are prophetic, just prolific – both have ventured far and wide across the British countryside, with Dylan-esque rambles from Marling and quaint electronic via Lindsay’s Tunng. Yet LUMP is its own entity, a synthetic hirsute creature born in Seuss’s whimsical wasteland – and while this first album only grants us a fleeting glimpse, Marling and Lindsay convey startling visions through their new vessel.

What still remains in LUMP’s world? If you fast forward to the woozy and wonderful single 'Curse of the Contemporary' (I won’t stop you – it’s too mesmerising to ignore), you’d imagine the blazing bright desert that Siouxsie Sioux and company trekked through in 'Arabian Nights'. But behind that, you’d feel the cool breeze of droning flutes that loop through the lagoon, especially the half-Portishead, half-Joan As Police Woman cavern of ‘Rolling Thunder’. And if you push forward, the last heavy machinery of mankind hums like a Kraftwerk steam engine through 'Hand Hold Hero'. As distant as these coordinates might seem, they’re all on the same grid, so that LUMP resides in a fully rendered & self-contained space; each zone allows the other to exist.

What does LUMP see? The story goes that Lindsay constructed this blasted landscape before Marling penned the words, which might explain the poignant disjointedness of her lyrics. We’re certainly not just staring out from a cabin in the woods; rather, our protagonist seems to look down from an omnipresent angle, injecting literal human essence into the automated Zen. “Please don’t leave your bed in a mess / just in case you get some new guests,” Marling advises in the Feist-like dormitory of ‘May I Be The Light’. It’s the kind of admonition that your mother drills into you, and which you obliquely ignore, because what guests would drop by your third floor apartment? But that dissidence – between the old world of spontaneous hospitality, and the new one of self-imposed hermitage - is precisely what Marling wants us to feel, as “Shaking the Shell” laments through a wondrous round: you won’t shake your shelter / and your shelter won’t shake you”.