It inevitably happens every January: no matter how exhaustively thorough I am in compiling my Year End lists the month before, a record from the previous year always turns up unexpectedly that I overlooked or completely missed altogether. In this case, I’m referring to the extraordinary Everything Wrong Is Imaginary (2006) by one-man musical outfit Lilys, led by one Kurt Heasley. I had been familiar with the band, but I don’t have the slightest recollection of hearing or reading anything about this album when it was released last summer. Little could I imagine how much goodness could be contained within its grooves (or rather ones and zeros, to be specific), and how this record would become a daily addiction for over two weeks now.

Truthfully, I can understand why Everything Wrong Is Imaginary slipped under my radar; I’ve never been too impressed with the music of Lilys. Critics often seem to toss around the phrase “musical chameleon” in reference to Heasley, which some may view as a compliment, but I’ve always translated as “pleasantly unoriginal.” Philadelphia-bred Heasley formed Lilys at the dawn of the ’90s as a noisy dreampop band and recorded a couple of shoegaze-by-numbers LPs during the first half of the decade. He then took an abrupt turn into psychedelic ’60s guitar pop (complete with the requisite Rickenbacker and shaggy mod haircut), and released a few albums that attempted to out-Kink The Kinks with predictably contrived results. 2003’s Precollection found Heasley discarding much of his Small Faces fixations and moving closer toward an individual sound, which, after fifteen years now, he has undoubtedly achieved. Everything Wrong Is Imaginary is well worth the wait.

In the past, Heasley would focus on replicating, instead of interpretating, his musical obessions, whether it was the Pale Saints or The Who. Yet Everything Wrong gathers up a seemingly infinite amount of influential sources – minimalist Krautrock, hazy shoegaze drones, mechanized New Wave, late-’80s SST guitar noise, and of course, jangly ’60s pop – and somehow congeals them all into everything I could ever want in a pop record. The tunes are undeniably hummable and catchy, but there are so many bizarre and discordant elements, all of them so wonderfully out of place, that it’s difficult to truly get a grasp on the individual songs themselves. A bouncy groove will be knocked off balance by a whirring blast of feedback, an unexpected note from a cheap-sounding Casio will immediately shift the color of a chord, or Heasley will suddenly adopt a peculiar faux-British accent mid-song without explanation. Initially, it’s a bit much to take in, but repeated listens yield countless rewards, and there simply isn’t a dull spot to be found.

A sizeable chunk of the record’s success can be attributed to producer Michael Musmanno, whose aural imagination must be on the level of a younger Dave Fridmann (before he began lacing his tracks with truckloads of sterile, flatlined compression). Heasley basically sent Musmanno some home-recorded tapes of the songs, which were little more than multi-tracked skeletons with guitar, vocals, and some drum programming. Musmanno fleshed out each of the tunes with studio musicians and, more importantly, injected a distinct personality into each of them. The result is that none of the tracks share similar sonic templates and possess their own unique palettes, so to speak. What sounds like a disjointed, incoherent mess in theory actually fits together in its own jagged, unusual way; plenty of variety is rarely ever a hindrance.

“A Diana’s Diana” is a great example of the pair’s warped genius, a delicious pop confection fueled by a springy drum track and a fluid bassline that freakishly changes shape from a programmed, streamlined pulse to trebly plucks and snaps in arbitrary fashion. At times Heasley’s urgently whispered vocals give little indication of where the harmony is going, and with the bank of shimmering keyboards ricocheting around the mix, the whole production occasionally borders on chaos. It’s like tuning into a pop song from an alternate universe, only with nearby alien frequencies threatening to swallow the transmission at any moment.

“A Diana’s Diana” – Lilys 4:06 (Everything Wrong Is Imaginary, Manifesto 2006)

Disguised as they are, there are still plenty of radio-friendly hooks to be found on Everything Wrong, and if one had to choose a single, “The Night Sun Over San Juan” would be a fine candidate. The cartoonish keyboard effects scattered throughout the album are curbed here for layers of guitar, with a thickly-fuzzed one at 2:19 nearly steering the track into a noisy oblivion. Despite Musmanno’s inclusion of the dreaded “studio musicians,” what’s most enjoyable about the playing here is the sense that these guys have been around each other for years. There’s a charming sloppiness to the execution and a detectable familiarity between the musicians, so much that the notion of an overdubbed, lifeless, and “professional” recording becomes moot; this track could have been recorded on a basement eight-track with some minor post-production polish, and that’s about it.

“The Night Sun Over San Juan” – Lilys 3:45 (Everything Wrong Is Imaginary, Manifesto 2006)

Really, I could have picked any two songs from this record to showcase its weird accessibility, from the shifting mass of oceanic guitars on “Knocked on the Fortune Teller’s Door” to the sunny New Wave leanings of the instrumental title track. Although it’s not technically a “new release,” it’s the first great record I’ve heard so far this year and has my highest recommendation (eMusic also has it available for download, for those so inclined). Those debating on dropping a car payment on Lilys’ out-of-print back catalogue would do well to just pick up Everything Wrong Is Imaginary instead.