Jack Ladder & the Dreamlanders - Hurtsville

The man born Tim Rogers has been a lot of things in his career so far. First he was an alt.folk crooner in the Smog/Oldham mould on his debut, Not Worth Waiting For. Then he was trading in doomy loverman soul in the Nick Cave tradition for Love Is Gone. Now, with his newly-minted band behind him, he’s made the wryly-titled Hurtsville, an album whose spiritual home is 1986, somewhere between Simple Minds circa Alive & Kicking and the Triffids of Born Sandy Devotional. Just listen to lead single ‘Cold Feet’ – the gated snares! The chorus effect on the bass! – or the seven minute title track, which transforms one of Sydney’s nondescript inner southern suburbs into a place of romance and intrigue.

Speaking of Cave, ‘Position Vacant’ could almost be a Grinderman growler (or, with a tiny tweak to the central guitar riff, Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’) while the haunted ‘Blinded by Love’ is pure Bad Seeds. The jangling guitar that underpins ‘Dumb Love’ is one of the few nods to the previous Ladder discs, coming as it does before the pulsing drum machine of the epic closing track ‘Giving Up the Giving Up’. And Rogers knows how to write an ear-catching couplet, whether it’s “I lost my virginity again last night / You say it’s gone, but it still puts up a fight” (‘Short Memory’) or “All my past lovers have become the best of friends / They hold a weekly meeting, and they’re plotting their revenge” (‘Hurtsville’).

The album also just sounds great. Ladder's bandmates give the songs deft arrangements (particularly former Mercy Arms guitarist Kirin J. Calinan, whose warped sounds are all over the album) and Burke Reid’s production supports them at every turn. And if eight songs seems a little short for an album, that economy works to make it one that doesn’t outstay its welcome (which can’t be said of most discs whose average track length is around seven minutes). Hurtsville's late-night mood and blackly romantic tone doesn't merely make it the best Jack Ladder album yet: this is indubitably one of the finest Australian albums of 2011.

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