Dick Diver managed to avoid the dreaded “sophomore slump” with their 2013 album Calendar Days (Chapter Music) & look to perfect a “three-peat” with their third album Melbourne, Florida.
This is their first domestic release & first for Trouble In Mind. Recorded in a former sheep-shearing shed in Apollo Bay, Victoria by Mikey Young, the album hums with a strident assurance, buoyed by the benefit of the band’s four talented songwriters whose singular voices sit comfortably beside each other in the albums twelve tracks. The crack of a snare starts off the lead-track, “Waste The Alphabet” an anthemic, jangling stomper full of bluster & swagger, while other tracks like “Leftovers”, “Year In Pictures” & “Percentage Points” yearn with a bookish intensity, complimenting the band’s dichotomy of erudite pop smarts and and idiosyncratic approach to composition (see Montfort’s charming & disarming “Beat Me Up (Talk to a Counsellor)”). If Dick Diver weren’t already leading the pack of new-school Australian pop, then Melbourne, Florida is sure to put them in the pole-position.