There’s a real sense of déjà vu to Sleeping Patterns, Melbourne songwriter Jordie Lane’s long-gestating debut album. Nodding to rickety prewar blues, high-flying ’70s folk, and saloon-stool country, these songs feel like sepia-stained photos unearthed from an attic. We’ve heard many of the sounds before, but that doesn’t stop Lane from tackling them, with the help of up to 15 collaborators and an even larger cast of fictional characters.

Textured with banjo, the loping ‘The Publicans Daughter’ introduces Lane’s studied wrangling of old-timey flavors. From there, he and friends, including co-producers Jeff Lang and Tim Hall, thumb through the years with both glowing nostalgia and critical hindsight. The results are mixed; the history-steeped ‘I Could Die Looking at You’ offers Lane’s poignant finger-picking and a real romantic streak, while ‘War Rages On’ grapples awkwardly with the Vietnam War.

There are some bluesy numbers, like the bitter ‘Fell Into Me’ and ‘Dig Straight Through’, which is made all the more effective by not taking itself too seriously. Propelled by honking harmonica and ragged backing, ‘John W. Thistle’ sounds like The Band riffing on Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’. Though stuck in the past and bowing to the cults of Americana and early rock, Lane updates and localises the story, singing of “freaks in the two-dollar shops and middle-aged trannies” in Melbourne’s growing suburb of Thornbury.

Meanwhile, ginger wine and a strip club crowded with vampires figure into the closing ‘Love Has Locked The Door’, with its pensive piano and more reaching vocals. Lane isn’t above the sentimental metaphor – “It’s closing time/And love has locked the door,” he sings – but on the previous track, ‘Walking That Way’, he breaks out nicely with his band for some howling organ and a friendly choir, leading into a tight drum roll and gnarly licks.

Lane clearly covers a lot of ground here –there are even two brief instrumentals – but amid so many changes in scenery, it’s the quiet-as-can-be ‘The Day I Leave This Town’ and ‘Clearer You’ll See’ that resonate most. It’s as if Lane has snuck up close and is singing directly into our ear, without the safety net of his band. He’s got a sincere, versatile voice, but it can be tough to get a grip on it elsewhere. And in the end, he would be better off looking around him more for inspiration rather than emulating, no matter how lovingly, the music and people that came before him.

by Doug Wallen