Snowman - 'The Horse, The Rat And The Swan' (Dot Dash) Released 24/05/08

It’s their nature: snowmen always melt. Even the most pristine creation eventually gives up its crisp, cold purity and drains into the earth and trickles back down to the water table. And so it is with music. Every so often you’ll hear a new approach, something that stands out from everything else around, only for it to be swallowed up again.

Yet Snowman have delayed the inevitable. The band’s 2006 debut served notice of their ambition with music that was always fascinating, teetered occasionally on the verge of greatness, yet was only entirely convincing in relatively short bursts. For now, no one else seems to have taken up the challenge they laid down, and here they are, purer, cleaner, more vital and more distant than ever, with a follow-up that represents an astonishing leap forward. 'The Horse, The Rat And The Swan' is a monstrous album, always mutating but never letting up.

The first minute or so of the opening track – 'Our Mother (She Remembers)' – sets the tone. A viciously insistent snare beat from Ross di Blasio is joined by primitive guitar and some furious vocals from Joe McKee, which briefly settle into a chant – there’s a “dark cloud rising” – before dissolving back into indecipherable chaos. Soon after, the first of the contradictions comes in: bass player Olga Hermanniusson adds some gentle and rather dreamy backing vocals. Elsewhere, in another of the incongruous moves typical of the multinational Australians, it’s the English-born McKee – rather than the Indonesian-born Andy Citarwarman, Snowman’s other lead vocalist/guitarist – who adds gamelan. Indeed, it’s an album built very firmly on percussion, in a similar way to PiL’s astonishing 'Flowers Of Romance.' It’s perhaps too early to say, but it might even prove to be as important an achievement. It’s often as unsettling, and just as severe, though much busier and more conventional in its instrumentation.

Snowman’s greatest strength is their depth. Their music is the sound of dreams and nightmares, the human unconscious, our dread of death and change. This is dark, desperate music that comes from those dark recesses we’d rather not look into and goes straight into the soul.