In the narrow confines of the Australian music scene, it’s edgy guitar pop and rock for the young, and country, blues and folk for the old. AC/DC is revered by all. It’s not hard to stand outside this world; the trick is to construct something substantial while you’re there. Augie March does it with a particularly Melburnian blend of deep and heavy lyric and a woozy take on the big rock song. The effect is romantic. It’s music from the lighthouse. Five boys are up there, in mid-Victorian rags for all we know, and they’re onto their third album. Moo, You Bloody Choir is its awkward yet distinctive title.

The band is led by Glenn Richards. He sings and writes the songs, and he has a great voice: high and pure on the album’s many mid-tempo numbers, and a snarling rasp when he rocks. The songs are huge. Whether Richards is writing out of sheer ambition, or just decided on a whim to write them this way, does not matter. They’re done in CinemaScope, and in great detail. With titles like ‘Mt Wellington Reverie’, ‘Bolte and Dunstan Talk Youth’ and ‘Thin Captain Crackers’, it’s a long way from I-want-you-baby, or any of rock’s other generic combinations that songwriters good and bad have thrown together over the years.

The instrumentation is sympathetic without being startling. The band members thankfully eschew much of the exotica that can creep into songs like these, carrying them off into Tom Waits territory. There are no glockenspiels, hammers hitting tins, or late-’60s Moog synths. Instead, the band supplies quality essentials: drums, bass, acoustic and electric guitars, and keyboards. They play them well, sneaking around Richards and his lyrics because, except for a few introductions and some arrangements in the fades, there’s not room for anyone to do much. This is a lyric-focused album, requiring only a pretty but steady rendering of the melodies.

Richards describes himself as “not a very literal songwriter. I am just hoping that imagery will suffice.” Narrative could be his weakness. But is a good story necessary? Here’s the first verse of ‘Victoria’s Secret’:

O how my great liberal heart labours

With the piss in my rivers and gall

Before gleaming ceremonial sabres

Who falls on them falls for us all …

It’s lovely language – and perhaps an injustice to haul out sections of Richards’ imagery and lay them on the page for dissection.

The enigmatic chorus follows:

Every night I pick the locks

On that white Victorian box

Every night I pick the locks and

The gaolers say…

And it runs straight into the second verse:

Some nights when I look through her window

And she seems an old lover to me

There peeling off her black nylon knee-highs

And yielding her breast to the sea …