It says something about the musical climate that consternation can be caused by an artist making an album markedly different to its predecessor. Perhaps it's something to do with the long shadow cast by Oasis's continued success, which suggests that a rock band's career should ideally be a kind of forced march: you trudge doggedly along a fixed route and any unexpected deviation is punished by a public too thick to cope with change. So it was that the Horrors' recent second album was greeted with astonishment, partly because the Horrors had actually survived their own hype to make a second album, but mostly because it didn't sound like their debut: here instead was a Krautrock- and electronica-influenced delight, its pleasures alloyed only by the terrifying thought that its more lovelorn numbers might have been inspired by Peaches Geldof.
In truth, however, the Horrors' progression wasn't that surprising. Whatever you might have thought of their initial shouty goth-garage incarnation, it was clearly born out of esoteric musical tastes: you don't form a band that sounds like the Birthday Party sticking Screaming Lord Sutch's head in a cement mixer because a focus group has reported that's the kind of thing that will prise the all-important Radio 2 demographic away from their Jason Mraz albums.
In fact, the really startling musical reinvention of 2009 is that of Jack Peñate. He hit the charts in 2007 as a kind of male equivalent of Kate Nash, a concept it's hard to countenance, even now, without emitting a reflexive yell of panic. He peddled anaemic, bandy-legged gorblimey guitar pop with a side-order of anaemic, bandy-legged gorblimey cod-reggae. At least he did until March of this year, when he released Tonight's Today, which seems destined to remain 2009's premier WTF? moment, unless Bruce Springsteen is planning on using his Glastonbury slot to debut his new wonky techno direction. A luscious attempt to capture the disorientating moment when daylight and reality intrude on the glamorous nocturnal fantasy world of the all-night dancefloor - "I shuffle into the sunrise a zombie ... she looks at me and says 'What a sight'" - Tonight's Today appeared to bear almost no relation to Peñate's previous work, instead setting its cap at the nu-Balearic scene. The beats shuffled dancily along and the song was decorated by a genuinely magical guitar sound: equal parts the sparkling, African-influenced tone used by Vampire Weekend and the kind of echo-and-effects-smeared noise you would find on an old Cocteau Twins record, it succeeded in sounding simultaneously bright and woozy, like sitting in the sunshine in a deliriously altered state.
It's a sound much in evidence on Everything is New, a WTF? moment that lasts for 45 minutes: the songs are uniformly great, there are blaring horns, four-to-the-floor house beats, fathoms of dub-influenced echo, gospel-ish backing vocals and - perhaps evincing the influence of nu-Balearic's all-embracing nothing-is-uncool ethos - the kind of mock-party sound effect found on Lionel Ritchie's All Night Long.
Endearingly, no one seems more startled by Jack Peñate's sudden musical transformation than Jack Peñate. The lyrics abound with references to moving on, leaving the past behind, trying something different. "I'm ripping the posters off the wall, I'm moving the boxes into the hall," offer the opening lines of Pull My Heart Away. "Everything is new now, change has been released ... dance away defeat," he sings on the title track. Actually, he sings "everyfink is new now", the tendency to drop into an affected Estuary accent being perhaps the only aspect of his former self he's failed to abandon. On one hand, it's tempting to point out this would be an annoying vocal mannerism even if it didn't chafe with Peñate's public school background - it seems unlikely anyone would have thought George Harrison had written a classic if his big contribution to Abbey Road had gone "somefink in the way she moves" - but then again, it seems a bit like nitpicking in the face of such guileless-sounding fun.
Of course, Peñate's transformation may have taken place in the most cynical circumstances imaginable: he may have been hauled before a record company A&R man who realised there was no more cash in bandy-legged gorblimey guitar pop, but thought there might be legs in "going dance". But crucially, it doesn't sound like it. There's something beguilingly wide-eyed about Peñate's approach. His songs are gloriously, unabashedly pop: it's hard to detect anything studied or knowing about them or their musical references. Instead it sounds like the gleeful, inspired work of a man who's recently undergone a Damascene musical conversion, possibly at the hands of his producer, Paul Epworth. The album's title is no idle boast: unexpected pleasures come no more unexpected than this.