Albums of the Year # 4 Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - Hope Downs

From June.

Hope Downs, the debut album from Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever out yesterday from Sub Pop, a record I had no little anticipation for and one that didn't disappoint me in any respect. The Melbourne band have been showered with critical garlands over the past couple of years with their two splendid EPs laying the groundwork for this, surely as good a guitar album as anyone will put out this year.

The record sparkles in a remarkable way that will remind those of a certain age of those of their youth, the songs and albums that made you fall in love with this stuff in the first place. The band are well aware of this themselves, commenting on the amount of 'grey hairs' that tend to attend their gigs. There's good reason for this as their songs are distinctly reminiscent of a fabled lineage of bands, The Go Betweens most obviously, but also Flying Nun bands The Clean and The Bats and the still thrilling guitar play of Television. They had Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd while Rolling Blackouts go for a three pronged attack both in terms of guitars and songwriters and lead vocalists.

There's a restless spirit and forward momentum from first to last. Also a determined positivity which is wonderful to hear in these most troubled of times. The record comes racing out of the traps and never once lets up, ten tracks of small characters on a vast landscape, quite clearly an Australian album that evokes sky, sand sea and outback like the best Triffids and Go Betweens records. The band themselves give an apt description of their sound and approach as 'tough pop - soft punk', they're Indie but more expansive and in some ways more ambitious than their immediate peers

It's a record that just invites you to come back to it again and again. Lyrically flowing and continually interesting, picking up the baton from McLennan and Forster and running freely with it. So while this is not necessarily anything new, there's so much invention with familiar ingredients, Hope Down is an album of eternal return and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever a band of current wonder and future promise.