i am going to break into your regularly scheduled programming for a minute to let you in on a delicious little musical secret. a secret that you, my very dear friends, are going to be so thankful for that you have no choice but to send me flowers and beef jerky and name not just one but all of your children after me in gratitude.

this treasure i speak of is actually only a secret here in the usa. formed in 1996, augie march (named after the saul bellow novel) is a quite justifiably popular band in their native australia, as well as britain, which continues to have collectively better taste in music than we do.

i discovered augie march thanks to an aussie guy (named herbert, oddly enough) with whom i shared a train car on an overnight trip from prague to krakow last summer. he let me borrow his ipod while he slept and when i heard the songs from strange bird, i had to wake him up to tell him how transfixed i was. that went over well, as i am sure you can imagine, but still…i fell for augie march from a great height and counted off the days until their third album moo you bloody choir was released in february of this year. i got it the day it came out and have listened to it at least once a week since then. this behavior shows no signs of stopping.

the legend of augie march goes like this - when lead singer glenn richards was 15, he became the first minor to get married in the state of victoria, australia. the marriage only last a week though, because his new bride’s parents worked for a carnival and left town, taking their daughter with them. i’m not making this up.

then when this painfully romantic soul went off to college, he hooked up with some childhood friends and started making some music. they got signed in 1997 but have been through a lot since then, including losing a founding member in a head-on car accident in 2000 and then camping out for months in an abandoned building in outer melbourne to write. i honestly promise i’m not making this up.

anyway, angsty mythologies aside, this band is seriously something special, shivery melodic poetry in the jeff magnum sense. it’s very folk-rocky with leonard cohen-esque lyrics that manage to be tragic without being trite and yet still leap in tom waitsian fashion from quiet atmospheric moments to powerful rocking out. listen to the song “one crowded hour” on their myspace page and see what i mean…the line “if love is a bolt from the blue then what is that bolt but a glorified screw” always makes my black shriveled raisin heart leap into my mouth. in the best way.

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