Instinct

Relocating from Australia to America via a brief stint in London, Richard Davies of The Moles lost the group’s original line-up along the way; for 1994’s Instinct, he was joined by New York locals, and NZ ex-pat Hamish Kilgour of The Clean. But that only begins to explain the change in Davies’s songwriting here – doubling down on the modular structure of his earlier material, Instinct’s abstruse chamber pop, full of regal brass arrangements, tight garage crunch, and dreamworld melancholy, makes of Davies’s tri-continental travelogue a kind of magical realism.