- I’m not sure how much it comes across in their music, but the three girls that are the acapella trio Aluka have a bubbling sense of humour. For instance they mentioned, in an interview, that Aluka - the combination of the words Appaloosa (a kind of piebald horse) and Larku (I have no idea) - means, completely co-incidentally, to plait or weave, in Zulu and that they were thoroughly relieved since it could have meant ‘poo in your ear’.

They also said that their main hobbies were making music, knitting and interpretive dance. I thought the interpretive dance thing was a joke too, until I saw the video for the single, Keep My Cool, from their debut album Space. Ha, it’s not as scary as all that and the sound is most diverting. They produce a bright, rhythmic jazziness with a Swingle Singers kind of vibe. That single, which has been kicking around for quite a while is definitely catchy, but instantly made (cynical, old) me wonder whether this would be able to avoid sounding like a great big gimmick at album length.

Aluka isn’t exactly a flash in the pan, the group’s been around since 2008, slaying them on the festival circuit and as opening act or backing singers for people like Lisa Mitchell or Clare Bowditch. Still, laying them in the aisles is a totally different proposition to laying down a whole album of material that people are actually prepared to invest their time in.

Canny about their craft, Aluka recognised at the outset the need to balance the ‘interesting’ qualities of their sound with some solid pop chops and classic songwriting. Sometimes the genres they’ve pillaged are quite obvious, like the jazziness of that single, or the modern r’n’b slink of a song like Station. I heard a snatch of trad. folk close harmony at the end of Tip Toe.

More often though the sound seems, well, African, I guess. I don’t know how many of the sounds here are genuine borrowings from tribal music, or rather the result of trying to use your harmonising backing singers as a rhythm section. The largest part of Aluka’s sound is full of bright, angular architecture of this sort.

The production, by young Melbourne guru Nick Huggins contributes to this brittle perfection. With acapella leaving so much of the background space in the sound Huggins and Aluka took their choice of recording venues very seriously, hunting down a variety of unusual locations, including old, abandoned halls that had to be accessed by breaking in through a window, echoing stairwells and the reflective surfaces of a wartime, concrete bunker. As finely crafted as it is, apart from some ambient noise bleeding through, not as much of this attention to detail is evident as I’d hoped for. There are a few clever experiments which work really well, like on Vision where the sound of the girls singing into vibrating piano strings made my spine tingle.

The cold rhythmic qualities of Aluka’s sound may make Space a little overwhelming to listen to in one go. Clearly, however, this is anything other than a gimmick, at least for it’s creators who’ve invested a great deal of effort and ingenuity in it. Always clever and often beautiful, if you don’t get all of what Aluka were trying to do with space, it’s still worth a go.

- Chris Cobcroft.