Album review: Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Hope Downs

The ghosts of alt rock past are all over the second album from Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - a spookily excellent Melbourne five-piece. The Strokes are clearly a touchstone as are RBCF's fellow Australians The Go-Betweens - a shiver-inducing mix of influences to which can be added the resurrected spirits of '80s Kiwi pop banner-wavers The Chills and The Clean.

This could feel like a re-heated pastiche, but they forge something fresh and exciting from their hodgepodge of influences. 'An Air-Conditioned Man' zooms off the starting line, Tom Russo and Joe White's counterpointing guitars investing the music with a breathless zing.

Russo and White share songwriting and vocals, along with the group's third creative fulcrum, Fran Keaney. As they swap lead vocals and pitch in with different perspectives and ideas, it adds up to a glorious mess: 'Talking Straight' and 'Time Is Common' arrive like frontline dispatches from the best indie disco ever.

Only occasionally does the past threaten to overwhelm their own identity. The Go-Betweens tinges are distracting on 'Bellarine'; 'Mainland' jingles and jangles like early REM. Yet Hope Downs unfurls at such a feverish peg that these moments are a brief distraction. Best of all, the whole thing clocks in at just 35 minutes - a brevity all too rare even in contemporary indie. Rolling Blackouts CF have delivered what may prove one of 2018's most essential alternative records - a glorious synthesis of pop, punk and pummelling insouciance.

Hope Downs is out now