SXSW 2012

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, gospel-inflected feel of “Over You,” to the downtempo 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.”