Wet Bandits: Bad Tattoos and Weathermen (digital outlets)

Debut album time for this Australian outfit which revolves around singer, songwriter and producer Finn Roberts formerly of Hawkes Bay.

There's an interesting, genre-avoiding quality to Roberts' writing and production: the opener Not Blue for example is a generous seven and a half minutes which takes its time to emerge from a caress of synths and a tension-release guitar part then after a minute or so his voice comes in for a piece which whispers prog-rock ambition.

Then we're into It's No Use which kicks in with a reggae beat (without the wall-shaking bass) and is a kind of regret-filled love song: “so I resort to the bottle. I spend, I spend all this time at the bottom avoiding stuff. To be honest I'd hit the Lotto to know you”.

Roberts does a good line in folk-based songs which are embellished into something harder (the punched-in synths on Mask On Mask Off, also with some reggae in the substructure) and that supports his literate lyrics as he explores a kind of breezy dream-pop with glistening guitars (So Sweet So Sublime), something akin to lightly forced ambient pop (the brief Showing Off For My Girl) and Shetland Pony, with a disorienting synth part and words which need decoding.

Although there are pop tropes throughout, Finn Roberts disrupts them – sometimes more successfully than others – and this is an album which perhaps requires slightly more work than it needed to.

But there's something interesting happening here and it's a debut album which announces his valid bid for attention.

.

You can hear this album at Spotify here