Innerspeaker Review

The whole record was made in an isolated house on the Western Australian coast, and you can hear the isolation in it. Everything is drenched: the drums are compressed until they breathe, the guitars are doubled and detuned against each other, and the vocal is placed so far back in the mix that it functions as another instrument. Solitude Is Bliss is the thesis, a riff and a lyric about preferring your own company, and it is the catchiest thing here.

Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind has a hook and a wobble that nobody else was getting out of a guitar that year. Expectation and Alter Ego are long and swirling and hold up. The weakness is the writing: the words are almost all about being alone in a room and thinking about it, delivered in phrases that never sharpen into an image. That would change. What is already fully formed is the sound, which is warm, physical and completely convincing, and it is one of the best sounding debuts of its decade.