The Vasco Era - Lucille

Let's face it: the first Vasco Era record was... well, a bit crap. The band made their name on the basis of their youth and their passionate live shows, but listening back to 2007's Oh We Do Like to Live Beside the Seaside in clinical, digital clarity proved that what seemed gloriously ragged in a sweaty venue with a few beers under one's belt sounded sloppy and ill-rehearsed through headphones in the cold light of day.

What a difference a couple of years and a chance meeting in a casino bar makes: Lucille is a full-blown concept album, based around a doomed couple that Sid O'Neill ran into when lurking around the Crown Casio in Melbourne, and the encounter clearly fired his imagination. The album follows the fictionalised Lucille and Sam, a couple who know that their love doesn't outweigh their self-destructiveness, and while there's not an A-to-B narrative as such, the story gives a much-needed structure and a focus to the band's loose, lively rock.

There's not a dud to be found on the album (although ‘Oh Sam''s mix of ‘Jack & Diane' and ‘More Than A Feeling' seems either to be a little too-obvious a chord progression or a genius play for daytime classic-rock radio play), but there are two undeniable masterpieces: the title track is a demented paean to desperate love, where O'Neill turns the album's title into a primal howl of desire, and the jubilant‘I Am The Chosen Vessel', whose title and strident drumbeat echo the Stone Roses' similarly confident ‘I Am The Ressurection'. Historians, rejoice: Lucille offers up a whole new ‘Era.

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