- What's the Battle Of Brisbane then? There are a number of candidates, but I think we're talking about that time the American GIs stationed here during WW2 started getting a little too much attention from the local ladies and our lads -god bless 'em- turned out en masse to show the Yankees what's what. Look at the cover of the new record: a US combat soldier (rapaciously!) surveying the Brisbane cityscape. It's got some vintage filter on it, but look closer and that skyline turns out to be all-too contemporary, watch out!

Locking up your ladies might be a bit extreme though (and sexist!), especially when you consider that the real Battle Of Brisbane is a war that lead instigator Matt Kennedy fights every day, in his own head. Look no further than their hard-bitten press release which describes the record as ten tracks of 'uncompromisingly nihilistic outsider rock'n'roll'. Well, yup. Despite the uniformly baleful outlook, there is a lot on offer here: Kennedy and co. have steadily been adding strings to their bows over the years, there may even be glimmers of sunlight through the hellish murk, Matt Kennedy may even be smirking at us...we'll get to that.

I have to say my favourite track is the bombastic opener, Sundowner, which presents with a disjointed but still rolling gait, like a bunch of locals on the sauce and patrolling the streets. Kennedy roars “This is Brisbane history, creeping round the background / Working hard, tough I guess, they have only let you down / DEFEND THE STREETS! FROM WHO YOU MEET! / DEFEND THE FRONT! FROM WHAT THEY WANT!” It's two minutes of utterly savage disenfranchisement, speaking to history but also more universal horrors at the core of you and everyone 'who you meet'.

Negative, short for negative family, continues the degradation, describing the barren homelife of a chap (possibly of a returned solider?) and his wife, given dead, monotone voice by Blank Realm's Sarah Spencer. Still, the mood is -almost imperceptibly- lifting and by the time you get to Bitter Defeat, despite the title, the riff at least has the warmth of The Pixies or Jesus Lizard, even if the optimism is derived from the bump you get when you reach absolute rock bottom. The trajectory continues, maintaining a slow, sludgy pummel, but steadily adding bittersweetness to the mix. The first taste of something really different is on Ache and that acoustic folk strand that Kitchen's Floor have been messing with. It's an anti-folk grind, devoid of anything friendly or gentle and may be as brutal as the opener. Transformative gestures continue on Doomed, which yanks the pace to 'upbeat', brings Sarah Spencer back and throws in a synthesiser, leaping the formerly insurmountable divide between sludgerock and new wave. It's clinically bipolar but that just makes it more fun.

The almost satirically morose lyrics continue to duel with those guitar riffs which grow only warmer on Observer, but then the mood is pulled back into line by the well-known track Resident Dregs and its post-punk sneer. It heralds the final plunge into slow and bitter defeat, through the tracks Strength and Twenty-Eight: another unfavourable examination of relationships and personal worth.

For all of Matt Kennedy's poisonous displeasure as he plumbs the depths of human ignominy, The Battle Of Brisbane is fought over a wide range of musical terrain and a lot of it is incongruously sunny, some even pleasant. Is Kitchen's Floor becoming a sludgy answer to The Magnetic Fields? Given Kennedy's wickedly dark and even more unremmittingly deadpan sense of humour, he may not qualify as genuinely despressed enough, but it does make The Battle Of Brisbane seem even more like some big, hideous joke he's having at everyone else's expense. That war he's waging inside his own head, could he actually have won it, just not care any more and just be laughing uproariously at everyone else's human weakness? Whatever the truth, I'm enjoying its strange savagery and, yeah, I think it might sound like...victory.

- Chris Cobcroft.