The Bell Divers: just so

I've wanted to write something about The Bell Divers for a while, having lived with their debut album June July for a few weeks and an unmastered version for some months before that. However, I've been hesitant to tarnish such a finely crafted thing with my comparatively fatuous rambling. What got me moving is that they're launching the album at the Brisbane Powerhouse this Sunday arvo. As well as wanting to at least try to be timely, there's some combination of the blogger's desire to get in first with a kind of protectiveness. See, I wouldn't be surprised if they were picked up by the broadsheet weekend liftouts like Augie March given their literate, elegant songcraft and understated Australianness - which is all well and good, but there's also this delicious oddness, a wilful perversity that needs celebrating and that somehow seems to make them our thing.

Rock 'n' Roll was supposed to be music for outsiders. We all know what happened to that idea and the marketing opportunities it presented but, even if it had remained pure, what are the outsiders to the outsiders to do? Some chase extremes and wind up self-mutilating performance artists but it's often the quiet, thoughtful ones that surprise us the most.

Consider Scotland's post-punk Postcard Records scene: Orange Juice and their fey, jangular mates. The Bell Divers probably know well the story of Forster and McLennan showing up at the door with their suitcases in 1980 and seeing Edwyn Collins or someone on all fours, ear up to the speaker to identify the precise model of Fender guitar being played on a John Fogerty song. If the story took place a few years earlier that person might come across as somewhere between sad and despicable but in the atomic shadow of punk's Year Zero policy they seem downright revolutionary.

The Bell Divers have their ears up to the speaker for OJ, The Go-Betweens, Magnetic Fields, forgotten '80s pop, Flying Nun, Swedish troubadours, and probably other things I've never heard of. Not that any particular influences are obvious. They seem to be one of those intensely focused bands formed by people who no longer have the naive enthusiasm required to accept compromise as the price of playing music with others and are lucky or determined enough to have found other people with a similar, very particular sound in their heads.

In this case the sound is a chiming, cleanly strummed guitar pop with keyboards; pithy and restrained but certainly not lacking decoration. Precisely the kind of thing you have to do really well to avoid mediocrity, but which shines all the more brightly when it is good.

The lyrics, enunciated with sincere plainness like a less droll Robert Forster, continue the double-outsider theme. Class is avoided in Australian alternative music and understandably so - inner-city kids with supportive parents playing dress-ups in back alleys seem damnably blithe when Bird Blobs come out with "I don't want to end up like my old man/Drunk at the mill you know he chopped off his hand". Bell Divers tackle it head on but from an honest, unromantic perspective, like Todd Solondz making a film about the kid brother of Bird Blobs' protagonist, gaybashed for pronouncing his "T"s, hiding from his dad and reading novels.

The songs are glimpses into the lives of ignored characters: the woman sharing life in a caravan park with "these brutal men/who have never seen the world". The lover of a man in jail who sees the sorrow in his "underwater eyes". The middle-class single who takes a tracksuit-panted "white trash lover" or invites a homeless man inside for potentially sinister purposes. And in the beautiful, dreamy "Little Breath", the 50-year-old woman whose son hangs up to soon but for whom "flour turned to wheat" when a 53-year-old man she met on a cruise made love to her. This isn't exploitation. The refrain from "Life in a Caravan": "The tourists come/and they go away/They take something from us/I don't know what". (Of course, the same song comes up trumps again with "Meet me in the games room and fuck me on the pool table".) Nor is it borrowed glamour. The other half of the album's songs deal with nothing more exotic than thoughtful youngish men considering relationships and personal growth, but share an uncommon eye for meaning in the mundane epitomised by "Fallen Down"'s "deep in a photograph of her family/you stare out dumbfounded".

Finally, a word about mystique. The Bell Divers have it. Singer Clinton navigates a crowd like some sort of noble among savages, wearing shorts. Guitarist Lobby is a smart-casual style icon who has busted out Chic-style guitar breaks mid-song and opened a set by deadpanning "Walk Don't Run" at 1am in the Troubadour. Their handful of gigs have included Ithaca Pool and community halls in the daytime. They have the ability to jar with a turn of phrase or by simply stopping a song when you're not ready. These details are important and, when the only criticism I can drag up after listening to the album too much was expressed by a friend as "it's a bit Bell Divers", the mystique could be what keeps me eager for what's next. For now, though, I don't need to be reminded not to take for granted this gem of an album.

*The Bell Divers photos were taken from their website - they looked ripe for the plucking and say more than I could but I'd be happy to remove them if requested.