The Ancients are a pop group that don’t suffer choruses. Songwriter Jonathan Michell has nothing pressing to say anyway, so he doesn’t need to emphasise or repeat himself. His songs drift from one over-exposed reverie to the next and the moods are unambiguous; usually fresh and upbeat, but sometimes delirious and on one occasion downright sinister. They’re neither rash nor flamboyant, excited or exciting, but their evanescent melodies linger like the fug after a daydream.

The Melbourne four-piece are thoroughly devoted to their exploration of the calmly unfathomable. Indie pop groups are often out of step with reality, but the Ancients don’t even try to write love songs, nor do they write songs about themselves, or us. This record follows a 2009 CD-R on the British label Moteer (slated for reissue next year) and an early Jonathan Michell solo album called The Ancients. Like those records, there’s something pre-adolescent about The Ancients 2, both in its boundless approach to sound and the chimerical strangeness of its lyrics. They’re a psych-pop band with an indie disposition, a test-pattern palette dulled to pastel by Michell’s reticent singing, which dominates with only a few exceptions.

He’s expressive, but mutedly so, always at close range and calm, even when he’s describing holographic horses riding to the bottom of the sea (‘Marsh Tomb’), and more so when he’s negotiating Christmas party brawls in his dressing gown (‘Rising Seas’). Michell’s guitar melody on ‘The Rambler’ lucidly evokes the common gravity of the song’s directionless wanderer, a rambler, who attracts condescension even from the cockatoos. The song exudes a sad whimsy reminiscent of the down-and-outs of childhood stories, bumbling and hopeless rather than broken or spent. It proffers strangeness, or failure, from the point of view of innocence, and while innocence in song can sometimes lead to something disingenuous or cloyingly twee, here it’s matter-of-fact. You are taken temporarily out of body. The same can be said for all of the songs on this record.

The beauty of The Ancients is how a simple rock ensemble can bring these foreign or hallucinatory images to life, to inflate them with a sense of space and location, to make them fleetingly real. The subtle electronic textures that cloud the lens make The Ancients 2 a lucid and fantastical proposition; a fairytale world with no moral reproof but an occasional dose of inexplicable dread, as during the atonal lurch of ‘Missing Page’. In this way, The Ancients create psychedelic music you don’t have to drug yourself to enjoy.

by Shaun Prescott