Machine Translations Venus Traps Fly

It's easy to get a bit suspicious of a band with a prolific output. Too often it's the result of uncertainty, an inability to self-edit, or just plain self-indulgence. Never mind the work ethic it takes to produce so much stuff - if it sucks, it sucks.

What a relief, then, to find that Venus Traps Fly, the sixth offering from Melbourne muso J. Walker, still has that special goddamn something that makes for endlessly satisfying listening.

Actually, Walker is simply not the type to bask in his own success, and why should he? He's been chipping away quietly at the experimental prog-rock block for ages now, and it took him six years and five albums, most of them home-recorded, to eventually get the recognition he deserved.

It's just over a year now since he released Happy, the album that finally got him beyond the limited release of his more idiosyncratic older stuff, and one that is very likely still on high rotation in many a stereo. But far from resting on his laurels in the face of success, the man has wasted no time in gathering together his motley crew of old collaborators and new friends, and presents us an entirely fresh collection of similarly oddball tracks.

J. Walker is an old soul if ever there was one, with a poetic vision that is reminiscent in some ways of Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, Grandaddy, or Badly Drawn Boy, to whom he's often compared. This has a lot to do with his charming and often deceptively flippant lyrics, sort of like diary entries mixed with slightly surreal urban vignettes.

But it's above all his appealingly idiosyncratic approach to songwriting that was enough to single out Happy, which revealed a lexicon of electronic samples, slide guitars, Eastern influences and soft, diffident vocals. Venus Traps Fly has all of that, and more, although it has less of the darker, more sinister undertones of previous stuff.

Changing pace and style consistently, while remaining a coherent body of tracks, Venus Traps Fly swings gracefully between playful and brooding. For instance, there's the offbeat and slightly demented Latino romp of Simple Life, replete with cha-cha-cha's and the charming presence of fellow muso and collaborator Clare Bowditch on vocals.

The meandering first single, Love on the Vine, is an endearingly laid-back musing that works particularly well in conjunction with the skewed gothic piano slamming of Scretch. One of the best and most characteristically quirky tracks is the inward-looking Bee in a Cup, opening with a wistful refrain of "Caught a bee in a cup / Fed it on snow", before swelling into a sliding chorus.

True to his word that he would never make the same album twice, Walker's production values seem fully realised in Venus Traps Fly, an amalgamation of much of his previous work, and distilled into what is possibly the most definitive example of the band's sound. And it's good - really, really good. What more can I say? Machine Translations is a gift that keeps on giving.