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”. Dick Diver started making rumblings in Melbourne in 2008, when the chemistry between guitarists Rupert Edwards & Alistair McKay coalesced with drummer Stephanie Hughes (Boomgates) and bassist Al Montfort (Total Control, UV Race, Lower Plenty). “Melbourne, Florida” is the band’s third album in six years time. The group had previously released an EP & two critically acclaimed albums (2013’s “Calendar Days” was nominated for The Age’s Music Victoria Awards; the largest public-voted music awards in Australia) on Australian label Chapter Music, but “Melbourne, Florida” is their first domestic release & first for Trouble In Mind. Recorded in a former sheep-shearing shed in Apollo Bay, Victoria by Mikey Young, “Melbourne, Florida” 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.

RIYL: The Clean, The Bats, The Triffids, The Feelies, Twerps, Ultimate Painting, Courtney Barnett