Surprisingly, Tinted House is a band from Dresden, Germany. Their sound doesn’t suggest this, and in fact, the members, along with a few Dresden natives, have come together from England and the USA through various musical stops. Their debut album, “Heavens” (2021), could be relatively clearly described as psychedelic dream pop. “Heartbeat-Shake,” their second album, instead, simply goes in all directions. You hear traces of 60s pop, psychedelic, folk, jazz, and krautrock; think of Mazzy Star, Khruangbin, Yo La Tengo, The Velvet Underground, and about 100 other cross-references, until “Heartbeat-Shake” simply becomes something entirely its own.

Carina Hajek’s voice forms the anchor in this kaleidoscopic diversity. Her magnificent narratives and her dark, velvety voice are the heart of the band. The Belgian-born American studied art and music in New York and has lived in Dresden for several years. In her intense, unpredictable live shows, she’s a dazzling performer who enjoys taking the stage with a stack of books and reciting poems during her songs. (“I love books, poetry, and having books on stage with me makes me happy, like having friends by my side. I can trust them, I can be surprised by them.”)

“Living under the same roof but leading different lives” is how the band describes the songs on the new album, which deliberately sets no boundaries and wildly combines a wide variety of recording techniques: live in the studio with recordings on old 4-track recorders, contact microphones with field recordings, sophisticated condenser microphones with direct input guitars. It’s clear that the studio process and songwriting on “Heartbeat-Shake” go hand in hand, and songs are constantly being reworked, resulting in a quite unique sound that feels lo-fi and suddenly expands into epic dimensions, sometimes sounding velvety smooth and sometimes like a small kitchen radio.

The choice of instruments is similarly limitless, incorporating not only the classic band line-up but also programming and loops, old electronic drums, floating clarinets (in the beautiful “Dizzy”) and many, many vintage keyboards. In “Sneaky Kid” there is room for a brutal feedback-ey guitar solo, and in the closing “Throw It Down” simply a casually rolls live in the studio. Often, however, it is such experiments in the arrangement that open up the song for the band. As in “Don’t Say I Never Gave You Nothing”, this can be a short analog tape loop of a prepared guitar that suddenly becomes the basis of a song: “I think we just want to achieve something that feels like us, whatever that is, even if that means we have to rediscover the wheel for ourselves,” is how Carina Hayek described the process.

Musically, the creative driving forces are guitarist and producer Johannes Till, keyboardist Ludwig Bauer and drummer and visual artist Matthias Günther. Till and Bauer have appeared as guest musicians on many songs on Wayne Graham’s recent albums. Guitarist Johannes Till, who also invents and builds devices for analog sound generation and composes music for dance and theater, also plays bass in the experimental country band The Gentle Lurch. Ludwig Bauer, who primarily plays keyboards, was a longtime member of Woods of Birnam and Polarkreis 18, often arranges wind instruments and strings (including for the Garda album “ODDS”), and contributes ideas to the electronic project qrauer.