Martin Frawley
Undone at 31
(Merge Records)
★★★★

ON HIS first solo record Australian singer-songwriter Martin Frawley breathes new life into that pop music staple, the break-up album.

Having formed the now defunct indie band The Twerps with his new girlfriend Jules McFarlane, the relationship — and Frawley, it seems — came undone when he was 31.

With its Dylanesque drawl, intensely personal lines and twee instrumentation, opener You Want Me? is so good it threatens to overshadow the rest of the broadly chronological song cycle. Other tracks examine problem boozing, “meeting the parents” and the inevitable crash of the relationship with McFarlane.

Lyrically, Frawley moves from the life-changing romantic energy of their first meeting to lamenting its been “weeks since you contacted me at all” on the regretful Come Home.

Let’s hope he doesn’t have to experience so much pain again to make music this impressive in the future.

Cass McCombs
Tip Of The Sphere
(Anti-)
★★★★

LONG the musician’s musician, the ninth record from Californian songsmith Cass McCombs is an expansive, restless set of songs with a pleasing depth and lots of instrumental surprises.

Other than the electronica of American Canyon Sutra, the music is an organic mix of folk, blues, soul and country, often with a good helping of jazzy psychedelia.

The Great Pixley Train Robbery, inspired by a real event in 1889, is an urgent, rollicking rock song which sounds like he is backed by Drive-By Truckers, while Real Life includes Lennonesque vocals over the top of a droning, tabla-assisted raga.

There is an underlying sense of the larger sociopolitical moment — in 2011 McCombs wrote a song called Bradley Manning — as on the lovely Sleeping Volcanoes, which refers to “class war all over the world”.

One of the best singer-songwriters working today.

Lily & Madeleine
Canterbury Girls
(New West)
★★★

NAMED after a park in their hometown of Indianapolis, Canterbury Girls is the fourth long-player from youthful sister duo Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz.

Recorded in Nashville in just 10 days, that the album was produced by Daniel Tashian and Ian Fitchuk, who have produced bestselling country artist Kacey Musgraves seems telling. The songs, well polished and produced, are catchy too.

Focusing on the problem of another person’s negativity, Supernatural Sadness is a brilliant slice of 1970s-influenced pop, while big single Can’t Help the Way I Feel has a strong Motown vibe.

Most intriguing is Pachinko Song, a mesmerising linear synth-rock song whose Tokyo setting and themes of escape, soul-searching and relationship woes suggest it could be an outtake from the Lost In Translation soundtrack.

This could be the record that sends the sisters into the big league.