“We’re not ambitious,” sings Robert Gibson on ‘Shy Retiring Kind’, Modern Western’s soaring second track. Really? Because the sound of Modern Western suggests just the opposite. It’s no wonder it took them four years to follow up Here’s to the Start of Something Beautiful – this isn’t an album that could have been slapped together over a few boozy weekends at BJB.

Let’s go back to the beginning, to dreamy opener ‘Evening Star’, on which bassist Eliot Fish’s voice is wreathed around lonesome piano and spectral guitar. It’s hardly rock, but it’s a perfect intro to an album like Modern Western. The string-laden ‘Shapeless’ is the first of many songs here that are deserving of being labelled epic, a feat it achieves without spilling over into the dreaded land of bombast.

The rambunctious ‘Cleveland Street’ is a more straightforward rock track – yes, it delves into some acoustic strumming in the middle eight, but it’s definitely the album’s least embellished track up to this point. Across its first four tracks, Modern Western has already displayed tremendous amounts of ambition, which the band has more than ably stepped up to meet.

The legacy of drummer Nick Kennedy and Fish’s former band Big Heavy Stuff looms ominously large over Modern Western, especially in the moody shadows of ‘One By One’ and ‘Last Thing I Know’. That’s not meant as a criticism – Big Heavy Stuff remain a high-water mark in Australia’s musical history, and that Todd Sparrow are continuing their work goes very much in the plus column. There also seems to be a direct line of influence coming from the Finn brothers, which shines through on ‘Into the Open’ and ‘A Secret Place’. Again, not a criticism.

At 16 tracks and just over an hour, Modern Western is something of a sprawl. Therefore, it’s almost inevitable that it should have a couple of weaker moments – not many, though. Gibson’s awkward enunciations in the title track threaten to derail it, while the shuffling ‘Is There Somewhere We Can Go?’ – with its horn section and “ay-yay-ya” backing vocals – feels a bit forced.

What little slack there is in the record’s mid-section is picked up in its final third – from the abrasive, propulsive ‘Green Bed’ to plaintive closer ‘A Secret Place’. The lilting ‘Terrible Things’ can’t hide its sinister heart, even if the chorus is just about the album’s prettiest inclusion on this record. The pummelling riff and towering chorus of ‘Last Thing I Know’ edge the record further towards darkness, before the track’s extended instrumental outro gives way to the ominous country tones of ‘Coat’. ‘Angel’ is the almost obligatory penultimate epic, before the sparse ‘A Secret Place’ ends the album almost where it began with ‘Evening Star’.

People mistook Daniel Johns for some kind of genius because he let Van Dyke Parks smother Diorama in orchestrations straight out of a Disney cartoon. But no amount of over-the-top arrangements could mask the fact that most of those songs weren’t very good to begin with. Modern Western features no such gaffes. These songs stand on their own with or without added flourishes such as keys, strings, horns and female backing vocals. But if Modern Western was just a collection of meat’n’potatoes rock tunes, it wouldn’t be nearly as successful. It’s the delicate balance between tracks like the grand (though not grandiose) ‘Angel’ and the straight-up ‘Songs & Apologies’ on which the album’s success hinges.

Four years is a long time between drinks, but Todd Sparrow have more than rewarded our patience (or lack thereof, in some cases) with Modern Western. Superb.

by Adam D Mills