More about: The Triffids

Five albums into a career defined by increasingly ambitious goals, The Triffids seemed more restless than ever. 'The Black Swan' is just as opulent a production as 'Calenture', its predecessor, and as intense, in parts, as 'Born Sandy Devotional', their classic. It departs from those and all of the band’s earlier works in its wild eclecticism, yet it somehow holds together, as a collection, almost as well as anything they did.

Conceived as a double album, 'The Black Swan' was eventually scaled back to a single slice of vinyl by a record company whose ambitions were rather more focused on mainstream success. For the Domino reissue, all of the tracks recorded at the same sessions have been restored, adding twenty minutes to the length. And strangely enough, though these tracks are generally the weaker ones, the album itself benefits. As with all the Domino rereleases of The Triffids’ albums, this version is truer to itself: it’s easier to appreciate and understand the vision behind it. The Black Swan' sprawls like never before, switching style and direction with deceptive ease, and is a more satisfying listen for doing so. But it also shows what the band had learnt: the songs here typically work better as big-production numbers than those on Calenture, which often felt a little stretched.

The opening of the album is as strong as any sequence The Triffids ever put together. 'Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think' evokes the heat of an Australian summer, and though it might be seen as slight in comparison to some of McComb’s other lyrics, it’s beautifully observed. Exactly the same can be said for 'American Sailors', a mere fragment of a song that leaves you wanting far more, and the largely electronic 'Falling Over You'. Between them, they set a pattern for the album: the aim with The Black Swan was apparently to create a series of specific and different atmospheres, something in which those opening tracks and the album as a whole succeed brilliantly.

If 'Born Sandy Devotional' could be likened to a great Australian film,' The Black Swan' is more like a festival of shorts, and as stylistically diverse. 'One Mechanic Town' harks back to the sound that dominated BSD, but introduces hints of a spaghetti western; The Spinning Top Song has an equally Australian feel to its lyrics but draws its sound from black urban America, without ever feeling borrowed or forced; the accordion and operatic backing vocals on 'The Clown Prince' bring cabaret to mind.

Among the new McComb songs, the country-tinged 'Go Home Eddie' is the most interesting. The big surprise, however, comes with 'Jack’s Hole', by Jill Birt. Though it’s far from being The Triffids’ best, when it’s considered with 'Good Fortune Rose' (and Open For You on Calenture) it makes you wonder how her writing would have developed if the band had stayed together.

The sore thumb is a cover of Presley’s 'Can’t Help Falling In Love', a career low that looked backwards as firmly as 'The Spinning Top Song' looked forward. Though the melody is almost perfectly suited to McComb’s voice, the interpretation here is totally out of keeping with the song itself. It amplifies the worst excesses of Presley’s Vegas years, and doesn’t even have the good grace to send them up. Nor does it retain the lightness of touch that The Triffids could normally manage even when they were at their most intense. If there’s anything worse than being bombastic and overblown on this scale, it’s being bombastic and overblown and so terribly, terribly earnest. The only other quibble is that 'Fairytale Love' is no longer the closing track, usurped by Aaron Neville’s 'How Could I Help But Love You' – a far better cover than the Presley number but nothing like so good an ending as 'Fairytale Love'.

A second disc adds a collection of demos – several hold interest but none improves on the finished version. Most significant is an early version of 'Goodbye Little Boy', recorded before McComb tailored it for Jill Birt. Two songs are previously unreleased and there’s a preview of a song that McComb revisited, in radically different form, during his solo career. But the substance is all on the first disc.

The great strength of 'The Black Swan' is that it brings such a diversity of music into a glorious whole, in much the same way as 'London Calling' did almost a decade before. The two albums don’t tell the whole story of the eighties, or even come close, but in their shared diversity they bookend the decade rather neatly. 'The Black Swan' inevitably lacks the wider cultural significance of The Clash’s masterpiece, but approaches and betters it at times for sheer mastery. It’s also a deeper, more personal work: once these songs have wormed their way into you – as they surely will – they’re difficult to do without. The tragedy is that they were the last The Triffids would record.

More about: The Triffids