Pitchfork

No wave and post-punk were cousins in sound and philosophy, disaffected soundtracks for disaffected youth on both sides of the Atlantic. Recently signed to Matador, the Melbourne trio Love of Diagrams invoke this moment of revolt on Mosaic, their full-length debut. With mad scientific precision, they clone that factory-town aura of blankness and unrest, as well as the bohemian suspicions of structure and prettiness for its own sake. This may as wel be a love letter to 1978. It might also have been a mere period piece, but every detail is emotionally spot-on, a lovingly crafted balance of fury and malaise.

Even Love of Diagrams' bare-bones palette looks like a reaction to Thatcher-era excess. Opener "Form and Function" reveals a simple blueprint: nervous drumming from Monika Fikerle, low-frequency ennui from bassist Antonia Sellbach, all mantled by Luke Horton's guitarwork. After 2003's The Target Is You-- their wordless, Sonic Youth-inflected debut-- Horton and Sellbach proved they could do a great Thurston and Kim, too. Yet on its own, Sellbach's deadpan witch-chant calls to mind Siouxsie Sioux, or the other Kim. There's this classic, spellbinding hollowness to it.

And it works its magic on "Pace or the Patience", which zips from earthbound dub to a passage of chiming lightness before reverting, inevitably, back to Sellbach's wistful indictments: "You came in with flying colors." Meanwhile Horton, tired of pleasantries, yells past her, "Well, can I give it to you?" There are a million ways this can be protest song, and a million it can't. In "At 100%" it could go either way, too: the steely jerk and winking corporate-speak could pass as an attack on the workplace, modern love, or, what the hell, modern love in the workplace.

Better not to know. They are usually going so fast, riding their hurried Krautrock rhythms, they almost race past any stable meanings. But when they downshift to slower tempos, they tumble clearly from outrage to resignation. Somewhere under the sludge of "Ms V Export", you suspect, lurks a pop song, all the balladry filtered through Sellbach's robotic delivery. You can hear more notes of defeat, but in the coiled-spring, Devoesque "Confrontation", the hope drowns it out.

Granted, historical accuracy has its downside. No wave and post-punk came from cold places, after all, and for every lightning-flash of dark and dissonant drama, there were untold stretches of dreary, bloodless austerity. Love of Diagrams undoubtedly realize this. They have learned from their forebears' mistakes, keeping Mosaic predictably terse and tense, but they achieve something else: a strange spartan beauty, full of listlessness and all kinds of longing.