Calling Broader Than Broadway — the follow-up to Belles Will Ring’s debut Mood Patterns — a “mini-album” underplays its significance. It suggests something that’s not fully-realised; a teaser perhaps for a future release. It’s more than a semantic point, really, because unless you’re the Buzzcocks or something, it’s the album that maketh the band. There are no “Mini-Album of the Year” polls, no “Top Mini-Albums By A Dad Rock Ensemble Circa 1969” lists in Mojo.

With seven songs clocking in at 25 minutes, Broader Than Broadway may be shorter than your garden-variety LP, but it ticks all the boxes required for an album. Songs. Check. A sequential tracklisting. Check. Now, can we move on?

Opener ‘I’m Walkin’ Here’, tells you all you need to know about the Blue Mountains quartet. Built on an arpeggio that sounds like ‘House of the Rising Sun’, it’s a slow-building slice of ’60s psychedelia with a typical drug-inspired lyric: “Now that we’re high/ Sing to me”, “When we come down/ Sing to me.” You can’t talk about this song — or indeed this record — without mentioning the harmonies. Glorious, rich and multi-layered, they’re enveloping, but never seem to burry the vocal lead.

It’s amazing to think that singer/producer Liam Judson and co. nailed these authentic “retro” sounds — jangly 12-strings, walls of reverb, swirling keys, fuzz, bells and tambourines — in a makeshift studio in his parents’ lounge room. It’s probably the same place he first heard records by the Byrds, Scott Walker and the Zombies.

Anyone can throw a bunch of ’60s kitsch at the wall, but it’s another thing altogether to make it stick. By never letting the sun-soaked melodies of ‘A Thousand Odes To You’, ‘Renegades’ and ‘Priest Coats’ become subsumed by their ambitious aesthetic, Belles Will Ring have crafted one of the best psychedelic pop albums, mini-albums — fuck it — releases of the year.

Small, yet perfectly formed.

by Darren Levin