It’s been five years since David McCormack’s last full-length release and it certainly sounds like those years weren’t wasted, with 20 tracks crammed into Little Murders. Maybe releasing all of these songs in one big hit is McCormack’s concession to the playlist age, when a lot of his listeners are going to rip these songs to whatever we listen to music on and then jumble up the order and skip half of them anyway. He’s just giving us more to choose from, making it less of a question of whether Little Murders is a great album and more whether you can make a great 10-song playlist out of it. Let’s see if I can.

1. We’ll begin with his restraining order blues ‘A.V.O.’ (“Legally our love is dead, but justice is blind”), which has three bass tracks, soaring keys and a prison-yard choir finale. After the song ends, one of the players says, “Fucking nailed it,” while McCormack screams, “Yeah!” Yes sir, you did just fucking nail it.

2. The loungy love song ‘Living Under The Flight Path With You’ for its gently shuffling drums and tinkly piano and McCormack getting his croon on while singing about the romance of having Virgin planes passing overhead.

3. Prohibition-era shuffle ‘I’ll Do Anything For You’ is a love song for a B-grade film star full of movie sound effects: cheesy western gunshots, flying saucer wobble and cartoon-feet skidding to a stop.

4. This is the moment when you need a rock break and ‘The Good Times (Keep Following Me Around)’ is a song that provides one in spades.

5. ‘Hey Anne Maria’ because there should be at least one song where McCormack’s voice doesn’t quite make it to the note in his trademark way and he namechecks a Brisbane suburb. (Indooroopilly, Brisbane fans.)

6. Part of the mid-album love song suite, ‘Landslides’ is a self-aware song that declares it’s “not even three minutes long” and that’s true. It’s 2.59. There’s a nice bit of a Sergeant Pepper’s breakdown when the band starts to play.

7. ‘Hit Me’, the sound of an Indian bazaar flying through space on a ship powered by saxophones, combined with giddy nonsense lyrics.

8. For a couple of moments ‘Lost Control’ sounds like he’s doing Radiohead or the Flaming Lips, but the lyrics are typically McCormack: “I didn’t know my left from right/Stalactite or stalagmite.”

9. ‘Future Ghosts’ is included not just because it’s a lovely tune with some nice synthy bits, but because it’s evidence that McCormack really has been putting some brain-time into confronting the issues surrounding the way we experience music today and how he fits into that. The answer is “awkwardly” but then, it always has been: “These days we’re constantly recording ourselves/But I want to allow the past to disappear/You’re never satisfied.” This is what you want, he seems to be saying, and I hope you choke on it.

10. I can’t think of a better way to end than a 47-second instrumental version of ‘The Blue Danube’. Bless you, David McCormack.

There, easily done. And that’s not just leaving out the filler, but a few gems that on a different day in a different mood would have made the list. Even back in the Custard days, McCormack was always a singles man. His strength was writing gloriously naive pop tunes that lasted for less than three minutes, while the rest of the album often felt like a collection of afterthoughts.

Little Murders has plenty of the giddy pop songs that have always been his forte, but 20 is a lot of anything. As such, it’s an endurance race with wide-eyed and whimsical tunes as the hurdles.

by Jody Macgregor