NIGHT BUS

Dreamy Melbourne psych-pop band the Ancients return with third
album Night Bus.
Their first record for Chapter Music, Night Bus is an impeccably
elegant, expansive album, a layered guitar epic with twinges in all
the right emotional places, Baby-faced fretwizard Jonathan
Michell's eerie, often falsetto murmurings are set against swirling,
soaring psych-pop, impeccably recorded by John Lee (Pikelet,
Lost Animal) and Neil Thomason (My Disco, the Slits).
The six minute Molokai, a sweeping guitar symphony in miniature,
was premiered in July on Impose Magazine, New single Hey Now
is probably the catchiest thing Chapter Music has released all
year, while the gentle, instrospective title track sees Michell
musing over a trip on one of Melbourne's infamous late night
buses.
The Ancients were formed in the late 2000s by Michell after his
tenure in celebrated supergroup Mum Smokes, who played a Dirty
Three-curated All Tomorrow's Parties in 2007, and whose 2009
double album Easy/House Music became an Australian underground hit.
The band's lineup has shifted around Michell over the years, but
on Night Bus it includes keyboardist Yuko Kono (of Japanese band
My Pal Foot Foot), drummer Julian Patterson (a former Mum
Smokes cohort who has also played in Kes Band and Minimum
Chips, amongst others), and bassist Georgina Ward (Function
Group, Moon Dice, also the painter of the album cover), Matt
Nicholson of Function Group also plays banjo on the wistful House
Of Cards, while guitarist Hamish O'Neill (Moon Dice, Isle Adore)
has recently joined the band, but doesn't play on the album.