If Chris Martin and co had any balls at all, they would be making music like this. Instead it falls to a Leeds collective made up of Chris James on vocals, keyboards, and guitars, turntableist Kidkanevil, Justin Percival on bass and vocals, drummer David Levin, and Rod Buchanan-Dunlop on keyboards, to do so. And so we have stirring vocals matching swirling orchestration backed by beats seemingly fashioned by DJ Shadow.

It was Shadow, interestingly enough, who greeted Stateless’ 2005 ‘Bloodstream EP’ with the endorsing “as close to perfection as I’ve heard in a long time”. Indeed, so impressed was the DJ that he invited Chris James to sing on ‘Erase You’ from last year’s Outsider album. Consequently, James spent a sizeable chunk of 2006 touring with Shadow, playing 70 gigs in 19 different countries.

Initially signed to Regal Records, an offshoot of EMI revived in the 1990s to host more leftfield acts including the likes of The Beta Band and Lily Allen, Stateless were inexplicably dropped. They’ve since joined the books of !K7, a Berlin imprint devoted to electronic music. Alongside label mates such as A Guy Called Gerald, Matthew Herbert, and Four Tet, they appear to be very much at home.

Produced by Jim Abbiss who’s worked with Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian, it’s actually an earlier project of Abbiss’s which informs this eponymous debut more. Back in the late ‘90s he was invited by James Lavelle to work on UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction album. Then UNKLE comprised Lavelle and, that DJ again, Shadow.

In an interview Abbiss recalls the way Shadow operated in the studio led to a change in his own modus operandi: “He did not know any technical terms, or how the desk worked, so he would ask for sounds that gave him a feeling. He'd say things like: “When it comes to the middle section it should have the feeling of an aeroplane coming over and nearly deafening you.””

“The way he approached music made me completely rethink the way I did sound. The desk became a much more creative tool again for me.”

Stateless, the album, then is akin to DJ Shadow remixing Jeff Buckley. Meanwhile, Stateless, the band, resemble Coldplay with cojones. As a result, these very Northern minds offer a more than rewarding listen.

(4¾/5)