- It's been an almighty wait between studio albums for The Drones. Five years seems forever when you're talking about what many consider to be Australia's best band. Not that the long silence hasn't been broken by any number of shrieking teasers along the way: live albums, acoustic sets and DVDs, side-projects galore including two solo albums by drummer Mike Noga and frontman Gareth Liddiard.
Many of these were great in their own right, especially those two solo albums, and, as it turns out, some of them were signposts for the sound of The Drones' latest opus I See Seaweed. The glorious, splintering noise is now interspersed with tracts of brooding, acoustic quiet. If Liddiard's similarly restrained Strange Tourist focused the mind, almost unbearably on the complex jumble of needle-sharp thoughts pouring of his mind, even amongst the noise here it is impossible not to be struck by the skewering observations, mated to deftly lyrical songwriting and delivered in Liddiard's hideously grating, slobbering tones.
Characteristically bold, the record opens with its title track: eight and a half minutes that has it all. Oily atmosphere fronts on to a sentimental, summer idyll, memories of youthful romance that eerily roll over into what may or may not be metaphorical murder. Liddiard turns his baleful gaze to the crowd, doling out universal condemnation: “we're like stepping in our billions / like stepping in our swarms / like stepping in the certainty that wanted to be born / ...and ain't that just the way things are?” The roaring chorus takes off and it surely speaks to something broken inside me that being sprayed with so much bile feels so right.
The comparatively restrained single How To See Through Fog is still as judgemental as all get-out and channels a streak of icy, restrained rage at the targets of its paranoid imagination. Getting even more subdued, the positively jazzy They'll Kill You grooves quietly, helped enormously by Steve Hesketh's urbane work on the keys, through a self-examination that blooms into a personal apocalypse. The range of styles is impressive, take the (even more) unhinged Little Richard rock'n'roll of A Moat You Can Stand In. I've never really been sure what genre The Drones are: they travel through so many – garage, blues, grunge, jazz, folk, hard-rock, art-rock – touching each with their own madness, but never staying very long.
It's unusual for a record that's so eagerly anticipated to deliver so successfully on all its imagined promises. The hideousness of The Drones has crashed back into town, sticking its grasping fingers into our collective skulls and rummaging around, searching for the lobe that will produce a universal howl of approval. They've got it from me, this record is great.

- Chris Cobcroft.