About five years ago, my younger brother and I constructed a makeshift home recording studio. The intention was that we’d take full advantage of the leisure afforded by university holidays and record the art-rock magnum opus we knew was inside us.

The equipment was basic—guitar, bass, piano, computer, cheap Casio keyboard—and our musicianship almost non-existent. Nevertheless, we were armed with complete self-belief and fuelled by our favourite albums—Mogwai, Red Snapper, My Bloody Valentine, Hal Hartley movie soundtracks. Great albums have been made from fusing post-rock jam-band aesthetics, live instruments, hip-hop sampling, and electronic beats. Ours was not one of them.

Last year I uncovered what our album should have sounded like: Pivot’s Make Me Love You.

This Sydney-based quintet makes a sound that’s not too dissimilar to Chicago-based jazzy post-rock bands like Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. The elements are all there, from Richard Pike’s Jeff Parker-like guitar playing, through to the use of unconventional time signatures and odd instrumentation. Still, the sunny ambience is much more Harbour City than Windy City. I imagine this band jamming in a sunlit garage in shorts and sandals.

What first grabbed me about Pivot was their unconventional use of turntables. In a radio interview last year, I heard dub-plate maestro Dave Bowman explain that unlike most rock band DJs, he doesn’t exist solely for street-cred seeking scratches, but to add unusual melodies. Take the violin line in “Artificial Horizon,” as it cuts in and out—a spectral melody from the upper rooms of a haunted house.

Even when the instruments are made of strings and skin, rather than grooves in vinyl, the band’s virtuosity and knack for arrangements is apparent. The grinding drum and bass groove of “I May Be Gone for Some Time” would be menacing if not for the offsetting delicacy of synth washes and a xylophone (!) line. The fusion of dark trip-hop and cool jazz isn’t new, but it’s rarely executed so infectiously.

A similar combination of lock-tight rhythms and subtle atmospherics is used to even greater effect in penultimate track “Kirsten Dunst.” What it has to do with the blonde starlet, I have no idea. The only similarity between the two in my mind is that I have a deep affection for both. Kirsten and the song remind me of riding a bike in the spring sunshine. That’s probably just because I listened to the song doing exactly that.

My band won’t change your life. Hell, it didn’t even change mine. But Pivot—they just might.

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