Intercooler
Forever or Whatever
Shock



Since the vague label of rock music encompasses such a disproportionately enormous number of artists, it's especially tough for a struggling band in the area to stand out but it's such a delightful surprise when they do. Intercooler's second album in almost five years, thankfully, is one of those rare occurrences to achieve the latter rather than the former. This Brisbane band deliver a collection of songs which are surprisingly diverse, interesting, and at best, pretty damn catchy.

Right from the opener - the melodic, electronic-infused Sail This Into Me - it's clear that this is not just a redux of their debut album 'Old School is the New School.' What starts as an intimate ballad finishes with a flourish of 60s-inspired keyboards. That energy flows into the second track Destiny, a more conventional slice of rock with a clever, strangely infectious chorus of "I'm gonna mess with your destiny/You're gonna mess with mine more". From here, each track heads in a slightly different direction. All Coming Back To Me is one of the most nimble tracks on the album - even if its chorus of "It's all coming back to me/Front and back of me" doesn't make a whole lot of sense, the backing "oh yeahs" somehow manage to plant the whole chorus in the subconscious. The same can be said for the "whoa-ohs" of Pop Clothes, which sounds like a slightly less sardonic, more upbeat version of something the Dandy Warhols might have recorded, while the folk-pop of My Problem finds interesting ways of expressing familiar emotions.

The sweet closer, the Badly Drawn Boy-esque Ok Girl is backed by Sydney's Stella Maris College Choir and is the perfect song choice to finish the album. By this point, 'Forever or Whatever' has travelled in a circle from gentle pop to hard-edged retro-rock and back again. I immediately wanted to go around a second time.

Brian O'Neill