In late 2003, I was in the crowded bar of the Evelyn Hotel for the album launch of Sydney rock stalwarts Bluebottle Kiss’ fifth album, Come Across. Only a few months earlier, the band had ripped through a ferocious retrospective set at the Rob Roy, which left me thoroughly converted and with a bad case of tinnitus. My excitement at hearing their new material was palpable. I may even have been shaking. When main man Jamie Hutchings walked through the room during the support acts, I gushed so much to my friend that she laughed at my “man crush.”

Fast forward to mid 2006 and Bluebottle Kiss again have a new album, their first since the departure of founding member Ben Fletcher. It’s called Doubt Seeds and it’s a double album. At 20 tracks and a little over 80 minutes, Sufjan Stevens would probably call it an EP, but it comes in one of those big clunky double-CD cases so you know it’s going to be a “big” album.

When I saw this ambitious packaging and the promotional sticker claiming that the album “evoke[s] the spirit of Tom Waits, Neil Young, Sonic Youth, Coltrane, Sonic Youth and more,” I have to admit to misgivings. Double albums are foolish at the best of times, and when they indulge the band’s long-hidden passion for free jazz, only more so.

I am pleased to reassure you that it’s nothing of the kind. Sure, it’s big; it has long horn-section freakouts; it name-checks former Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. But it’s that rarest of beasts—an ambitious record that lives up to its claims.

Previous Bluebottle Kiss albums have borrowed heavily from the swaggering indie rock of the Afghan Whigs and Seeds is no exception. Disc 2’s “Little Black Dahlias” would not have sounded out of place on the late-90s output of either band, especially with the presence of a rejoicing choir in the mix. Still, like all Bluebottle Kiss’ magpie-like borrowing, it’s never facile aping or pastiche—it’s an exploration of what made bands like The Whigs great.

The promised free jazz influence is most apparent on “Dream Audit,” a chaotic maelstrom that morphs into a monstrous Fugazi-like rifforama and finally into Hutchings’ trademark surf-guitar influenced rock. The intensity never lets up for a second and the stylistic shifts seem anything but forced.

The mellower direction previously explored on 2002’s Revenge Is Slow returns for tracks like “Scrub the Mist.” Centred on a simple piano line and delicate banjo plucking, it still retains the passion of the louder tracks. Hutching’s sounds perpetually on the verge of collapsing under the weight of some great emotion—not in a petulant emo-kid way, but the tension of a grown man struggling with the knowledge that it doesn’t get any easier with time.

It’s clear from the liner notes that Hutchings intended this album to be a musical encyclopedia of the last half-century of music. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but to have succeeded in drawing together so many disparate influences in a record that is still uniquely the work of one band is a triumphant achievement.

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