hile listening to “Komad,” the nine-minute suite that opens Alex Delivery’s debut album, Star Destroyer, I can’t help but be reminded of the grandiose, if not creatively corpulent, “kitchen sink” experiments that informed the infant Boces days of Mercury Rev. Save Nik Bozic’s bleary-eyed bellow, which is strikingly reminiscient of Dave Barker’s (the Rev’s original ringleader), there’s nothing tonally on “Komad” that is remotely similar; no woodwinds or brass, no jazz-tinged fits or miniature choirs. Instead their link lies in Alex Delivery’s ability to harness the periphery, the out-of-bounds clicks and echoes, clang and din, and either find a welcome place for it within the song, or follow it directly towards uncharted pathways.

In lesser hands, such corralling of both chaos and comfort, can seem excessive or pretentious (even for groups as universally lauded as Mercury Rev), but on Star Destroyer every external distortion, found sound, and brief excursion is lovingly forced to be an integral part of the overall framework. It’s an album suited more for headphones than hi-fis—otherwise you might miss the faint field recording of a bus making its routine stop, bottles breaking on concrete, or birds chirping in the distance.

The Star Destroyer is as much an extra-terrestrial warcraft as it is a horse-drawn gypsy caravan, both vehicles equipped with expansive satellites able to transmit each other’s black box to the world in tandem. It’s an album that constantly travels an oblique roadmap, simultaneously welding robotic assembly lines to the tent revivals found along dirt roads and all points in between. “Milan” takes a journey through celestial ambience, a ride down Cluster’s fluorescent autobahn, back to the post-rock, sepia-toned plateaus of an empty desert, and finally touches down on an overgrown jungle in which an orchestra plays to the moonlight that pokes through the canopy.

That perpetual motion, through landscapes once remembered and astral realms undiscovered, gets repeated on “Sheath-Wet,” with both earthen tones and metallic buzz running parallel with one another, fighting for attention. Many times though there’s too much conflict between the elegant and the grotesque, as on “Scotty,” one of the album’s shorter sour notes, where under the surface the band plays a haunting carnival waltz with music box whimsy, only to be completely obscured by a brooding industrial march. Or on “Rainbows,” another brief song that almost succeeds as a heart-stung ballad of twilight twang—until it’s riddled by what sounds like a swarm of locusts hovering over the campfire, eventually devouring the song.

While I’m inclined to side with any outfit that can seamlessly thread the warehouse scrap of krautrock with weightless shoegaze, damaged folk, and bright synthetic propulsions, the effort required to imagine Star Destroyer as something more than faceless psychedelic imitation is tiring. Huge aspirations and sprawling attempts at recording every crackle in the universe are euphoric upon first listen, but it’s a feat not suited for the timid. After all, it did take Mercury Rev three tries to finally get it right. Surely Alex Delivery has plenty of time to one day find that happy medium.