Augie March's twists and turns add zany quirk

Words are a great source of fun for Augie March's shy wordsmith and frontman Glenn Richards (front).

If you listen to Victoria's Secrets, a song by Melbourne band Augie March, you'd swear they've been everywhere: "I've kissed the green gem of the east coast, drunk the tropical fizz of the north, played the far-flung sandcastles ate at by the Indian, froze in the broken off port."

Yet this is their first time to New Zealand.

"It's the same distance to Perth," explains frontman Glenn Richards, rugged up against an oncoming flu in an Auckland hotel. "But they've heard of us in Perth."

That may be about to change. The band's third, quietly introspective album, Moo, You Bloody Choir, has been called a "flat-out masterpiece", a work of "sheer beauty" and "vividly realised heartbreaks". This year it was nominated for the Triple J Award for Australian Album of the Year. After a showcase gig to an invited Auckland crowd last night, the band play the Odeon tomorrow with Melbourne-based New Zealand band Cassette.

Richards and bandmates Edmondo Ammerndola (bass), Adam Donovan (guitar, keys) Kiernan Box (keys, strings and horns) and David Williams (drums), share Cassette's love of breezy folk and country guitars but have a more experimental bent, not unlike Wellington's Phoenix Foundation.

"There are always turns and twists in our songs that perhaps are regarded now as a given, a natural quirk," says Richards.

"But production-wise, the way we ended up going was a little bit tame. Although I think it's a lovely record."

What is especially lovely are Richards' lyrics. Sometimes cryptic and antiquated, always poetic, they reveal a love of metaphors and unusual turns of phrase.

"Now I know you like your boys who take their medicine from the bowl of a silver spoon, who run away with the dish and scale the fish by the silvery light of the moon," he sings, barely without pause on the album's first single, One Crowded Hour.

It might not make for the easiest singalong and, sure, it's a little bookish for a rock band but words are a great source of fun for this shy wordsmith. They allow him to communicate "in a way that I'm not especially good at communicating in speech". Even if he can't always remember what they meant at the time.

He doesn't consider himself a poet because he's yet to write anything without his band. The music is his way of cheating.

"There's poetry that I like but there's always music in it. You can get away with a bit of murder."

That freewheeling approach has generated inevitable Bob Dylan comparisons, although he suspects that's because "there's a lot of nonsense in there and there's a lot of nonsense in Dylan". He has spent a long time listening to Elvis Costello who can be just as "ridiculous", plus Shane MacGowan (the Pogues) and Will Oldham.

A similarly rustic, earthy feel resounds in Augie March's songs, which are grounded in time and place. In Thin Captain Crackers Richards sets a scene from the window of a Melbourne bedsit, looking across the streets as a resurrected Ned Kelly rides past. Germaine Greer pops up in the sneering Mother Greer. And in Just Passing Through the scene changes to the streets of San Francisco, where some of the album was recorded.

"We don't have a terribly great way of teaching our kids about history," Richards laments. "There's quite a lot of the sinister beneath our shiny cities. That's appealing to me because, more often than not, that feeling is there. You can't really bury it."

The name came from an old book, too. Richards had studied the work of American author Saul Bellow at high school and was keen to get his hands on The Adventures of Augie March, a fictional tale about a boy growing up in Chicago during the Depression. The name stuck. And yes, he still gets the odd fan extending a friendly hand in recognition: "Augie, how are you?"

"All of my favourite Australian bands were named after books: the Triffids, the Go Betweens, the Dead Set."

It was a risky choice. The band are frequently mispronounced "Orgy March", although that could have its advantages.

Richards isn't adverse to the idea of fans interpreting his lyrics their own way, either. Even if there are a lot of words to interpret.

"It's got to be a really really fine song to be simple and to capture my attention," he says.

"Otherwise I prefer a little cloak over it."

*Augie March at Odeon Lounge with Cassette, tomorrow night