Pitchfork

"Written down here, gentle reader, it seems too good to be true": So begins the last and most ambitious track, "Fiction", on the Lucksmiths' eighth album, Warmer Corners. So too is this long-running Australian trio's brand of guitar-pop: idiosyncratic but accessible, literate but unpretentious, gentle but not weak, sincere not so much in presentation (cf. Springsteen, Bruce; Confessional, Dashboard) as in presence (cf. Richman, Jonathan; Comedy, Divine).

"Only connect," E.M. Forster-- who was twee if Belle & Sebastian ever were-- once wrote. As the epigraph for his 1910 novel, Howards End, these words described urban-- "creeping London"-- intersecting with rural, heart coming into harmony with mind. Warmer Corners is an album of and about such connections, where they meet, how they fall apart, and how they become art.

Known for supple wordplay, on this outing guitarist and primary songwriter Marty Donald opens up his diction and closes his rhyming dictionary. Don't worry, he's still flush with inspired lines like "you kept your distance and me guessing, finally acquiescing" on "Great Lengths", about a girl playing hard to get who gets hardily gotten. But "The Music Next Door" merely rhymes "door" with "more" with "a song I've heard a hundred times before," which all makes sense even if you miss the subtle wink. Then there's its Chekhovian storyline and its ambiguous non-resolution. You'll get it, O.C. kids will think they get it, and everybody's happy until concert tickets sell out. Look, over there, isn't that Ben Gibbard? [yoink]

Ahem. Warmer Corners also broadens the emotional base of its predecessor, 2003's excellent and underrated Naturaliste. That album allowed the regret that had simmered stoically since at least as early as 1999's Staring at the Sky to reach full boil. "How did they come to this?" vocalist/drummer Tali White wondered dolefully. The same sorrow clouds Warmer Corners, but beneath exultant arrangements propelled by guest Lucksmith Louis Richter's Rubber Soul guitar leads along with horns, strings, organ, and pedal steel. The happy-music-with-sad-lyrics shtick has been done often, but rarely so well since the Lucksmiths' namesakes. White's "Sunlight in a Jar" provides a shy respite of sheer joy.

Though most previous Lucksmiths songs loll charmingly within the Aussie countryside, 1997 throwaway "Wyoming" excepted, Warmer Corners acknowledges the band's extensive U.S. touring. Lead single "The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco" neatly juxtaposes both locales, with winter rolling out in Fog City as summer slowly passes Down Under. The song's soaring choruses and downcast gaze thrill me even more than when I first reviewed them. On the winningly meta "Fiction", White sings longingly of "a girl from Kansas City" in his usual rich, Morrissey-esque phrasing. Other songs take place unmistakably in Australia or bassist Mark Monnone's new home of Tasmania. The Lucksmiths never relinquish their distinctive identity, merely expand it.