“I go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way” — not the guy from Augie March…
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David Sheffieck: Like a slightly more allusive “Back to the Shack,” but rather than targeting people who wish the mid-’90s had never ended, Augie March aim at people who wish sunshine pop continued to be a force beyond a few brief years in the late 60s. Which is an immeasurably small demographic, no doubt, but also one that I’m part of.
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Brad Shoup: Just blissfully rolls along; I don’t know that I could pick a refrain out, but extract any ten-second stretch and you’ll find something opaque and tuneful. It’s like a Shins song that doesn’t oversell its baroque-pop moves; it just keeps dipping its oars into the reverb.
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Anthony Easton: I was wondering why this sounded so much like Belle and Sebastian, and I realized that they came from 1996 and have been working through the same kind of fluttering sadness that Stuart Murdoch can. But Murdoch has both pop hooks and a narrative skill. This floats by, refusing to land anywhere significantly.
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Edward Okulicz: As much as I miss the years when their ambition greatly outstripped their recording budget instead of the converse, there’s also something glorious about sunkissed harmonies sung at a miserable pace. The mildly aimless song in question here is given a feeling of both weight and buoyancy (it’s a magic trick) any time those harmonies float into the mix, and without them it’s a bit numbing, in a pleasant way. But it seems that there’s a sweet spot right in the middle of, uh, The Clientele and, double uh, Smokie’s “Lay Back in the Arms of Someone” and Augie March have found it.
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Jonathan Bradley: I don’t need my songwriters to be clever, and it’s usually better if they’re not, but I always used to appreciate that Glenn Richards — a kid from Shepparton no less! — was, like Robert Forster and Grant McLennan before him, unashamedly writerly in outlook. To swipe from Billy Connolly, Australia’s the sort of country that too often mistakes the tourist crap for culture, and though it’s true that “many Australians are quite cheerful about their status as the funny drunk uncle in the world,” I admired Augie March for being a band not of larrikins or bush poets or even, in the vein of Tim Rogers, bloke savants. They were florid and ambitious and solemn, taking their name from a Saul Bellow picaresque and their style from the lush and the ornate. Their decline has been a long time coming — eight years since their most recent good album — but “After the Crack Up” is a disappointment nonetheless. The lyric arrives submerged, and though the hazy arrangement is pretty, they’re well versed in this kind of shimmering drift, and it’s usually not so empty. This is only clever in the same way as is the complimentary wine at a reading hosted by a well-stocked independent bookstore. Or, a different simile: there’s nothing there; it’s like eating air.”
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Alfred Soto: Acoustic guitars strumming with such bovine satisfaction that I project creepy overtones: “Eye in the Sky” or something. The title’s a lie, of course; they really meant “Before the Nap.”
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