"Who looks at official websites these days?", The Riflebirds ask on their MySpace page. My answer to this question would be "Music journalists trying to find out about your band!", and although I may be a little bit conceited in actually being a music journalist, that would seem to be a fairly important group of people to consider when you're an indie band just starting out.

Apart from this brief and probably unintentional snub, The Riflebirds do a lot right though. Based in Melbourne, although they originally formed in Brisbane, they wisely avoid trying to describe a genre that they belong to, instead citing a laundry list of wildly dissimilar influences on their sound in an attempt to describe it. In a nutshell, they don't really sound like anything. It's very tempting to pigeonhole them into the post-rock genre, given their liking of instrumental soundscapes and long intervals of droney noise, but then a conventionally written (and well written) song section will come along and blow that theory out of the water.

A prime example of this on their debut EP is the track 'Gone Too Far', which starts out with a relatively conventional sounding song structure, sounding a bit like a marriage of a Radiohead style bass line and the vocal falsetto of Jeff Buckley. All proceeds much as you would expect it for about two minutes, at which point the guitars and vocals just seem to fall away, and is replaced by a formless wash of guitar feedback. It's not noisy or grating in the way that Mogwai would do it, the music just seems to fade away into the quiet hum, a sort of auditory æther from which only occasional, disconnected guitar notes can be heard through.

Other songs travel the same road, whether they are instrumental in nature or if they incorporate lyrics and more conventional song structures within them. It's not that any of the individual elements that make up these songs are revolutionary, but the way that they're all put together is quite unconventional and gives these songs an extra little bit of flavour. If The Riflebirds can keep this up, then their next effort could be very special indeed.