Pitchfork

"Love is a bolt from the blue/ But what is a bolt but a glorified screw?"

That nice little bit of wordplay, from the opening bars of Augie March's third album, exemplifies what this band is about. In keeping with songwriter Glenn Richards' background as an English major, they make literate, studied music richly adorned with unexpected turns of phrase, both lyrical and musical. That the Australian quintet has barely secured reliable distribution in North America is a minor crime-- with bands like the Decemberists and Belle & Sebastian in the ascendant, they're a natural fit.

While they'd sit nicely on a bill with those bands, though, they're reminiscent of a far less au currant band: Grant Lee Buffalo. It's more than just a passing thing, too, as "Just Passing Through" practically sounds like an update of GLB's "APB", though it certainly doesn't seem intentional. Most of it is down to Richards' warm croon and avoidance of uninteresting melodic phrasing. Like Grant Lee Phillips before him, he's a thoughtful singer who clearly spends as much time on the melodies as the words.

The vocal on "Mother Greer" doesn't flow so much as tumble, with words falling over the band's loping, country-inflected arrangement. The country influence threads through much of the band's output, making itself known in the tasteful tack piano of "The Baron of Sentiment" and frequent flourishes of slide guitar. "The Honey Month" plants its flag in an English music hall with its opening clarinet and trombone fanfare, but the echoes of an earlier era dissipate in a London fog of weary guitar, hazy Hammond organ, and a spot of Theremin. The song's atmospherics turn it into the album centerpiece, juxtaposed as it is with "Just Passing Through", the album's hardest rocker.

For the second album in a row, Augie March prove that generosity is their biggest fault, stretching the album too thin at one hour plus, a runtime that could easily have been trimmed by eliminating the rather stultified seven-minute behemoth "Clockwork". Still, it's a vastly enjoyable record, and the bits that get too long are easy enough to ignore when taking in the larger picture. Hopefully, the machinations of the music industry will be kinder to them and they'll take their rightful place in the players of fans of literate pop around the world.