Imagine that Radiohead and Muse got together and re-wrote Sigur Rós songs for a band with metal tendencies to play at parties where Album Leaf fans go to have existentialist novels re-told through a sonic soundscape. On acid. In space. With the guys from Rush.

Meet Gazpacho, a Nordic sextet with a fill-in-the-blanks style all too common in European imports. Their latest effort, Tick Tock, is their fifth album, third major-label album, first stateside release, and, by all rights, another success for the group.

I should probably explain that whole “existentialist novel” thing. Tick Tock is a vibrant re-telling of the 1939 French memoir Wind, Sand and Stars, about a pilot who flew mail routes over the Sahara desert. The album tells the story of the novel’s central event, in which the pilot and his navigator crash with little to no supplies in the middle of a vast desert and slowly give up hope for rescue. In layman’s terms, it’s a pretentious-as-hell concept album.

To this end, the lyrics are rife with vivid descriptions of hopelessness and character, and the music exists to set the scene. Gazpacho does a lot of things right in Tick Tock, but unquestionably the greatest part about the album is the way the music sets up a perfect atmosphere to facilitate whatever is happening in the story at that point.

The seven-track album only technically has four songs on it: Two short pieces (“Desert Flight” and “Winter is Never”) bookend the longer works that make up the gist of the story. “The Walk,” divided into two parts, uses familiar musical tropes to set the empty desert scene before taking those themes and going into progressive directions as the mood of the singer changes, and the three-part centerpiece “Tick Tock” is a swirling miasma of hope and despair having a knife fight. The band is at their strongest here; the bass player and drummer especially break loose with a cool riff here and there to remind everyone that, yes, this is a band, and not a piece of performance art.

There only seems to be one problem with Gazpacho, not even particularly with this album. They are derivative of so many great bands, like Radiohead and Sigur Rós — to a fault. Their sound is spectacular, even sort of unique, but it sounds like they opened a textbook for “Great European Rock” and copy-pasted everything they could. The problem with trying to recreate the inimitable, as Gazpacho does at least here on “Tick Tock,” is the new band that gets formed often forgets the air of brilliance or innovation that came with their influences in the first place. So what comes out is a terrific sound that is all but soulless, a paint-by-numbers Kid A or OK Computer.

It would be a shame to discount Gazpacho just for that, though. They are a good band, they try and they succeed, and they write music that is at least worthwhile as background noise here and there. Pick up the new album on iTunes when it drops Oct. 13. The only question, truly, is whether or not to pick up anything else from their discography after giving Tick Tock a couple listens.

Reach reporter Morgan Gard at weekender@dailyuw.com.