Anita Robertson and her husband Kevin Robinson recorded this album in their own home in Portland, Oregon. Not that you can tell, as The Heat Can Melt Your Brain is about as spacy as lo-fi rock gets, packed full of dreamy psychadelic pop songs.

Live, the duo resemble a back-to-front White Stripes, both visually and musically, but on record, the crunching guitars are turned down in favour of shimmering sound effects and summery vocals.

Their bio describes them as "Grandaddy, The Postal Service and The Beatles partying in Phil Spector's house of horrors", although a more obvious parallel can be drawn with The Flaming Lips, especially on singles The Center Of The Universe and Alive with Pleasure.

The simple fact is that every song on The Heat... is catchy or memorable in some way, even if just with the song titles, like Free Nude Celebs and Mixtape = Love, both of which are beautiful tunes in their own right, even without the great names.

Possibly the highlight (no pun intended) of the album is High Highs, which is a chilled out disco tune that finds Kevin's low-key vocals mixing with hand-claps and subtle noises that all somehow becomes music. Apparently they used saws, sirens, kazoos and even their kitchen stove to create that Viva Voce sound...

Live, their vocals tended to get lost in the noise, but on record, both Kevin and Anita share the responsibilities and both have easy-on-the-ear styles. Daylight finds her in particularly dreamy mode, with a bassy line coming straight from Beck, whose lo-fi anthems are clearly a major influence on them.

But despite the links to other acts, Viva Voce only really sound like Viva Voce, and they do sound great. This is one of the best albums of 2005 so far, and if you didn't catch them at the Bierkeller this month, you should make the effort to listen to some of this album and then splash out for it.