How to approach a band like the Tucker B’s, who repel examination and comprehension as if defending a castle keep? The Sydney-via-Perth quartet has been making a willfully bizarre racket since 1994, and this indulgently titled fifth album is no exception. There’s a volatile, scrambled feel to it, but as with such forebears – Pavement’s Wowee Zowee and Ween’s The Mollusk – there’s an adventurous heart beating beneath the madness too.

If there’s anything tying this album together, it’s the idea of what it means to be a man, which The Tucker B’s examine like a dog chewing curiously on a bone. Chant-like vocals take a minute-and-a-half to emerge on opener ‘First Born Son’; a taut, cryptic song that touches on familial responsibilities.

‘Bear’ takes a light folk gait while tracing a path from excess (“I was always drunk by lunchtime”) to hibernation (“And when I went to sleep/I stayed in bed for 14 weeks”), while ‘Wow (A Bear’s Not A Man)’ marries sweet singing and vibrant keys with high-arcing crashes of guitar and random screams.

First single ‘Jungle’ slips along to a firm bassline and smeary synths, ushering in one of the more straightly delivered refrains here: “I promise you can trust me/I will be a good man/Call me if you need me/I’ll help you if I can.” It’s followed by ‘Cop’, a barroom joke turned nasty; ‘No Lazy Death’, an oddball ballad in the vein of Pavement’s ‘We Dance’; and the country-tinged ‘Mothers’. The knowingly titled, six-minute ‘Pompous’ resembles a few different songs stitched arbitrarily together.

Obtuse yet joyous, Nightmares in the Key of (((((WOW))))) ends with ‘Burd Surgeon’, which somehow tugs at our heartstrings while detailing the dismantling of a bird and a subsequent court case; and ‘Heatty’, an instrumental psych jam that’s soupy and shuddering. Like much of Tucker B’s recorded output, Nightmare is the musical equivalent of channel-surfing. Indeed, far from losing their pioneering impulses with age, these guys remain capable of just about anything.

by Doug Wallen