The Lucksmiths: First Frost (Fortuna Pop!)

14:20 | Friday November 21, 2008

The Luckless Smiths, as some have tagged these Morrissey-influenced Aussies, have quietly gone about their business for 15 years, recording generally overlooked yet increasingly radiant albums that have made them one of their country’s most prolific and consistent group of songwriters.

First Frost, their 11th studio album, picks up the baton passed by 2005’s career-crowning Warmer Corners and it maintains the band’s upward curve – this is grown-up Lucksmiths but one that still sparkles with the youthful zest that made them so appealing in the first place.

It’s just now they take themselves more seriously – gone are the witty, throwaway puns and two-minute songs that occasionally seemed out of place on their Nineties albums and possibly undermined the notion that here was a band to be reckoned with.

This may not read like a positive but, like Warmer Corners before it, First Frost is music to sigh to.

Not in a despressing, melancholy sense – it’s more of a nostalgic, comfortable and settled sigh made evident on album opener The Town And The Hills which blends brass, strings and airy vocals.

The album’s finest moments – the achingly lovely Good Light, the twee-est song title ever on the delicate The National Mitten Registry, the railway rhythm of Day Three Of Five and the Wedding Present-esque vibe of Up With The Sun – are among the best songs the Melbourne-based quartet have ever recorded.

Elsewhere there are nods to country in the duet Lament Of The Chiming Wedgebill and something of a guitar surge on A Sobering Thought and Never And Always and, though songwriting credits are shared by all four members of the band, there is never a lack of cohesion.

First Frost is the sound of four men growing older together, leaving behind the urban dreams of youth for gentler pursuits – but they’re not doing so gracefully.

“I don’t mean to suggest I’m getting older,” sings Tali White on Pines, “But the city looks its best over my shoulder…”

That should strike a chord with all who’ve followed The Lucksmiths’ journey down the years. We are, after all, in the first frost of our lives too...