Small World Experience - Shelf-Life LP

Originally issued on CD back in 1994 before being reissued by Siltbreeze in 2016, Small World Experience’s second LP ‘Shelf-Life’ seems to be at the root of a lot of my favourite Australian guitar music of the last few years (The Stevens, Shrapnel, Possible Humans). The songs all seem to roll effortlessly out of the band: guitar lines are exploratory without getting into jam band territory, the rhythm section pushes the whole thing along at a pace that teeters on the possibility of overrunning itself, vocal melodies naturally weave through it all without getting lost. Seems puzzling to me that Small World Experience aren’t spoken about with the same reverence as other contemporaries of theirs like The Clean, or maybe they are and I’ve wasted the past 25 years in ignorance. -Mitch