Album Review: You Am I - Sound As Ever (reissue) Hi Fi Way (reissue) Hourly, Daily (reissue)

Taken as a body of work, You Am I's opening trilogy of albums shows a band finding itself, and growing into one that should be rightly regarded as a national treasure. The latter two records particularly often swapping places in any of those Top 10, 20, 50,100 lists that seem forever being made by somebody.

As the band surfaced from the very unrock suburbia of Sydney's North-Western Hills in the early '90s, they somehow got lumped – like many other kids with long hair and clothes from Lowes – as some sort of local branch office of grunge. But, with Tim Rogers channelling the music and some of the moves of his record collection, they had an energy and the start of a style of their own, gaining them a spot on the 1993 Big Day Out where Sonic Youth's Lee Renaldo was impressed enough to offer to produce them an album in a studio in Minnesota – You Am I loading in as Nirvana finished up In Utero at the same venue.

They emerged a week later with Sound As Ever. Brilliant in parts, but in places hardly seeming like the same band from one song to the next. First single, Adam's Ribs roaring in the mostly incoherent fashion of the time, but making a few more people take notice. Then things just seemed to alter. They returned to Australia, and an already dodgy relationship with Mark Tunaley – the band's almost metal-flavoured drummer – saw him gone and Russell Hopkinson, who'd just left his band Nursery Crimes and wasn't planning on playing again, get himself a two-decade job alongside bassist Andy Kent as the adaptable backbone and inputs to Rogers' songs. Although recorded with Tunaley, the next songs lifted from the record better reflected what the band was becoming. Berlin Chair is unquestionably magnificent. It's frayed, desperate, longing, and rightly still an anthem. Then Jaimme's Got A Gal, possibly the first of Rogers' great character studies, as he mused on the brother he actually formed the band with, and how, “things would never be the same” as the family as well as musical dynamic changed. Somewhere among all that, You Am I became important.

Renaldo was called on again to produce album number two, but this time in the slightly more conducive surroundings of a New York studio, and the 'distractions' that provided. Now an absolute unit, Rogers' and Hopkinson's musical tastes and historical knowledge feeding off each other, the songs poured out of the singer. Cathy's Clown, Jewels And Bullets, and in Purple Sneakers, a song that made awkward romantic fumblings under the Glebe Point Bridge, and working out just what you're supposed to feel, a thing of pop glory. But Hi Fi Way wasn't just about the singles; the other album tracks are among the most loved of the You Am I canon. There's people watching, self-examination, and sheer rock'n'roll fun. And then it ends on How Much Is Enough, the questioning of the title the perfect upward inflection to mark the definitive end of a You Am I show for many years after. If you ever doubt Rogers' poetry and feeling, just go there. It closes their first number one record.

So, how do you top the near-perfection of that? You utterly overreach, but get away with it, and make something of true greatness. Hourly, Daily might not be the concept album some want to make of it, but it is certainly of a time and place. That place being so much of Sydney's inner-west, the only thing missing is the sound of Boeings overhead on the flight-path approach to Mascot. Augmented with Jackie Orszaczky-arranged strings and brass, the band sprawls from the sharp soaring pop of Mr Milk through the struggle of trying to face another Tuesday, to a dirty blast of soul horns on Baby Clothes. But whatever the style, you simply know these people – even in the broken bits they have showing. If We Can't Get It Together is Rogers' storytelling distilled. It's in the little details, from bonds on overpriced apartments, to the need to have a good record store nearby, and especially that 470 bus to Circular Quay that still makes me a bit wistful every time I pass one in Lilyfield. It all resonates, in a million scuffed brilliant reflections. 

Give me another thousand words and I still couldn't fully explain what these albums mean to me and many others. Just be glad they exist.