DYLAN Thomas wrote poetry prose with words that skipped, slipped and stuttered across the page.

So it is fitting that a band that takes its name from one of his characters, Evans the Death, should produce music as quirky and strutting as the Welsh master's words.

This London five piece return with Vanilla, their most ambitious and experimental album to date, ignoring the more traditional pop structures and hooks of their first two albums, 2012’s self-titled debut and 2015’s critically acclaimed Expect Delays.

Its often the case that when many bands try to find themselves, they lose their audience. Not so with Evans the Death.

Vanilla is a raw, extrovert and infectious album. The two opening numbers, Haunted Wheelchair and Suitcase Jimmy roar the music into being. Its then picked up and moves in a new direction with Hey Buddy and Cable St Blues.

Named after the undertaker in Dylan Thomas’ radio play, Under Milk Wood, the band was formed by brothers Dan and Olly Moss after meeting singer Katherine Whitaker at a Let’s Wrestle show. After numerous line-ups, the band is now completed by James Burkitt on drums and Daniel Raphael on bass.

Katherine's vocals in particular always hit the right spot. Its like she's taken ages to perfect her sound but Vanilla was recorded at Lightship95 in London with producer Rory Attwell, who worked on both of their previous records. Highly erratic in style and mood, brimming with extreme contrasts, from noisy to funky to melodic, energetic to dejected, full of chaos and restlessness, the album was the result of a carefully planned recording strategy, as Dan Moss explains:

“We deliberately booked very little time in the studio, and we pretty much did everything live, together in the room – there was no trying to fix any mistakes. What you hear is very close to what we did in that moment – so technically, while it isn’t overly polished or slick, it’s a very high fidelity recording – an accurate reproduction of the original source. I think that gives it more of an urgency and honesty than the first two. We decided to limit ourselves to 8 tracks and this meant we were restricted in how much we could alter things after recording, and the amount of overdubs we could do – which is what we wanted.”

Vanilla bounces wildly between styles, lending a real energy and vitality to the flow of the album. A dark, howling, ragged storm of an album, resisting categorisation, Vanilla is anything but – a far cry from the bland, unimaginative music that pervades the airwaves. It is a brittle, brilliant new chapter in the story of a band who never fail to surprise.

*9 stars out of 10.

James Hastings