PRONTO Mama, the math-rock-inspired new bucks who’ve just scored a debut album of the year with Any Joy said it was once suggested they rein in their diversity. “People won’t have a clue what you’re about,” was the well-meaning warning. But traditional genre now has less purchase on the music-consuming public, especially among generations brought up on tracks rather than albums and the hodgepodge of streaming services. Rather than apathy or disengage-ment this atomisation is one of the reasons for the much-lamented “death of subcultures” where what you wore signified what was playing in your headphones.

They may have been around the block before but Glasgow four-piece Medicine Men share that omnivorous appetite.

Recently released via Last Night From Glasgow, debut album Into The Light is an assortment of slinky house, pulsing krautrock and rousing, trippy songs which recall The Coral and ramshackle psychedelics The Beta Band. Another forebear is Black Affair, the minimalist dance project Steve Mason formed with Jimmy Edgar after the demise of The Betas. Certainly, frontman Ian Mackinnon’s vocals share the shaggy insouciance of Mason, for whom Medicine Men have supported.

“People would say ‘There’s too much variety’, and I would be like: ‘Eh? Can’t that be a good thing?’” Mackinnon says. “And I remember deciding there and then never to play that game, of never making music to order.”

MacKinnon grew up before streaming, and before the resurgence of vinyl put the price of an album way beyond paper round wages. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the stuff spilled from indy shops and secondhand stores. A tenner would get you two bags of scratchy treasure.

“I got the vinyl bug way before it all came back,” he says. “At the turn of the millennium when I was about 16, I got really into Northern Soul. Me and my friend would go to nights like Good Foot and Friday Street thinking it would be like Quadrophenia or something, but we were the youngest people there. Actually, my mate was younger but looked older than me, which was really annoying.

“It was as if they’d just stayed with that one thing whereas through Northern Soul I got into Motown and disco records. But if you went to hi-fi shops and asked about a record player, people would say: ‘What would you want that for?’”

MacKinnon did eventually acquire a turntable: one that could even play 78s.

“We had this friend called Groovy Graham, who was exactly how you’d imagine him to be,” he deadpans. “He had this rare ten inch that had to be played at 78rpm and came round as he knew my record player could do that.”

The record was 1949’s Snaketime Rhythms, the first recording by Louis Thomas Hardin aka Moondog. Blind from his teens, Moondog taught himself music by ear and braille, invented several instruments and eked a living for around 25 years as a Viking-helmeted street musician on New York’s 6th Avenue. An influence on Steve Reich and Philip Glass, his music is quite unlike anything you’ll have heard before. The young Mackinnon’s head spun.

“It was wild, absolutely crazy,” he remembers. “From that point on, I knew there would always be more to discover, more to open your mind to. I had gotten into music through Oasis as a kid, and at that age, you feel so intensely that you know what good music is, and that everything else is, well... shite. Hearing that made made me realise that not even people with floor-to-ceiling vinyl knew all there was to know.”

From the airy house of opener A La Lum, through euphoric centrepiece Realise Forget and closer Out Of The Light, the album – three years in the making – pulses with club grooves. There are memorable hooks certainly – The National has had the strident Sleeping With The Lights On on brain repeat for several days – but Mackinnon’s vocal melodies duck and weave around a nimble rythmn section rather than hog the limelight, a knack he pushes further as sometime vocalist with ice cool dance troupe Crash Club.

Like many searching souls, Mackinnon’s curiosity took him to Optimo nights at Glasgow’s Sub Club. Twitch and Wilkes are soon to celebrate twenty years of “what started out as a gathering of like-minded freaks” with an all-day takeover of Glasgow’s SWG3 complex featuring DJ sets from The Black Madonna and Ben UFO and live sets from Ghana’s King Ayisoba and Happy Meals, the synth duo who featured in The National last week.

“The first time I went to Optimo I probably turned up in a pair of desert boots and a Fred Perry top,” Mackinnon mocks. “And then I was just floored with some of the stuff they were playing. The kind of 100bpm deep house stuff that Andrew Weatherall does now, when it’s just a tiny bit too slow. I was like: ‘Wow. I didn’t know this sort of thing even existed.’ That’s what we tried to get on the album on tracks like Sleeping With The Light On.”

Just when you think you have Medicine Men pegged as some kind of swaggering LCD Soundsystem, they catch you off guard: the propulsive Show Me What You’re Made Of is punctuated with a filthy, Keith Richards-style guitar lick while the sloping blues of Bruised Peach is simply huge. The latter stuns similarly to Tame Impala’s 2012’s album Lonerism when Kevin Parker’s woozy psychedelia evaporates into the thunderous Elephant.

“Tame Impala are definitely an influence, and I’m happy to be compared with them and other modern bands,” says Mackinnon before noting he’s also a big fan of the sumptious, summery electro of Germany’s Roosevelt. “I think he [Parker] has got more interesting as he’s gone on. We saw him play at T In The Park in 2014 and it was so great to see him – we’d just played so we could relax.’ That T Break Stage set at the last TITP held at Balado was one of the first Medicine Men played under their new name.

“Selective Service had started off as a blues band but over the years we had evolved into something really different,” Mackinnon explains. “If you had told me back when we started that I’d be making music that was reminding you of electro bands from the 1980s – and that I would actually like it – I wouldn’t have believed you. We changed. But we felt we were still being pigeon-holed a certain way, so we changed the name. It was one of the best decisions we’ve made.”

As too perhaps was Mackinnon’s decision when, asked to play Last Night From Glasgow’s recent birthday party, to wing it.

“When they asked, our bassist and drummer had just left, but I said yes. I thought: ‘We’ll make it work.’”

There had been no bust-ups, Mackinnon says, it was a simple case of life and work commitments having to take precedence over day-long van journeys and lugging equipment around, often to play just a half hour set. What would make it all worthwhile would be a record – an actual document of Medicine Men’s work.

The world’s first crowd-funded label, Last Night From Glasgow invests in developing the artists on their roster, which includes TeenCanteen, Emme Woods and BeCharlotte and commits to giving each recording a physical release as well as a digital one.

“I’m so pleased to see Last Night From Glasgow do well,” Mackinnon says. “Not just from a personal point of view but also because of the way Ian [Smith] and Murray [Easton] go about running their label. The enthusiasm and belief they have in their artists is incredible. Ian has said he’d like to do another album with us, and though we all like to think we don’t care what other people think about what you do, as an artist that is so encouraging, especially after feeling like we’d been banging our heads against the wall for so long.”

Medicine Men play Woodzstock Festival, Inverness (June 17), Kelburn Garden Party (June 30) and Butefest (July 27) Into The Light is out now via Last Night From Glasgow www.facebook.com/medicinemenband