Album Review: Died Pretty - Lost Reissue

Even the band are probably sick of hearing it, but Died Pretty remain one of the great 'near misses', as the imponderables of the music industry – and not the least, themselves – often tripped up momentum gained.

Forming as Sydney's Radio Birdman-led first era of punk sputtered, Brisbane musical refugees Brett Myers and Ron Peno centered a band whose sound could never quite be pinned down – the much-pervading Detroit rock, Velvet Underground and the hypnotic minimalism of Suicide all fair touchstones. Their first album, Free Dirt, gave them an enduring reputation in Europe, but sometimes there was too much going on, the band lost in the clutter.

Lost is an altogether leaner beast. Myers' edged and spiralling guitar and Frank Brunetti's tumbles of organ found more balance. While Peno could be one moment a wounded animal; the next desperate a broken romantic. The album shifts as it goes. The rush of the opening title track and the Myers-sung Out Of My Hands are rooted in his recent relationship breakup. Springenfall is a lament, Peno crooning. Then a breath, an anticipation – and with a glorious phlegmed spit that clears any tentativeness that had gone before, Winterland rumbles and clatters over you. And so it goes, to a final plaintive duet with Astrid Munday, Free Dirt, underpinned with Don Walker piano touches.

Perhaps aptly, Lost is also about what's not there, but now is. As their distributor procrastinated over its release through 1988, the band finally found the right way into a crowd favourite. Everybody Moves is an undoubted glory, but after the myriad delays they released it as a standalone single later. Here, back in the context of the album proper, things may have turned out very different.