Aleks And The Ramps

Pisces Vs. Aquarius
Cavalier, 2007

There is a cartoon I like called Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law which is constructed almost entirely through references to other pieces of pop culture. It has very little in the way of character development or traditional notions of plot. The characters are drawn as heroes and villains from older and sometimes very obscure cartoons, who seem to have been reincarnated as lawyers for some reason left entirely unexplained. Each episode is made up as a series of clichés from other television shows and genres – especially the law firm soap – which are turned on their head for comic effect. For pop culture junkies, it's hilarious. For everyone else, I imagine it appears confusing and probably pointless.

Like Harvey Birdman, Aleks And The Ramps require a well-stocked knowledge of other pop music to be appreciated and there is a certain humour in hearing them subvert the usual rules of pop songwriting and performance. But the Melbourne band's debut album isn't in my "best of year" list just because it's some sort of in-joke for music fans – after all the tricks, Pisces Vs Aquarius remains an excellent and almost prodigiously imaginative record with strange and often disturbing themes. In other words, it has smarts and soul.

For some reason left entirely unexplained, the characters in Pisces Vs Aquarius are always trying to kill one another. Each song is a fragment of the same story, told either before or after various tragedies with acerbic and black-humoured attention to detail. The funniest track is the last, 'Diary Of A Lizard Man', in which the narrator watches their lover choke: "An earring fell off your ear and into the cereal bowl/ I couldn't help stopping what I was doing to watch you eat it whole/ Your oesophagus and I didn't know what to do/ Apart from watching your face turn blue/ It filled me with regret, but what was far worse/ Was that I didn't get the phone number of the nurse/ That I met when I visited you in intensive care." In terms of both storytelling and experimental pop music Pisces Vs Aquarius is a masterpiece. It makes Architecture In Helsinki sound like The Wiggles.

This column is part two of a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.