I must begin with a disclaimer. One of the owners of el Mopa's label, Quietly Suburban, is a good friend of mine. Hell, he came up to the States from Australia for my wedding (well, my wedding and Bumpershoot). In the 6 months preceding the release of Get Behind, I would listen as he talked up the band and how I would love them. And goddamn if he wasn't right.

Get Behind is one of those albums that you put on and then spend the next hour listening to as you lay out on the bed thinking about about what you would really like to do with your life. And then you take a breath and remember the hands of all the people you have ever held hands with, and how, when you where 11, you and your grandmother would watch movies on television on Saturday afternoons. It is too emotional to put on the stereo on a Sunday morning, but requires more attention than most albums you would listen to while driving to work.

El Mopa is your basic four piece, augmented and supported on record by horns, pedal steel, piano and a chorus. I am at odds over which supporting role is more important to the album -- the horns fresh out of a late night session at Stax or the blending background voices and chorus that color in the holes between the guitars and drums. Both, for some strange reason, give me the idea that traveling down a river by boat would be a wonderful thing -- just my family and me, trolling the waters in a slowed boat at the end of a summer. The horns have a shimmering sound, much as the river might shine as the sun hit and skipped off it...yet the sound of the multiple voices, all singing towards you from the speakers, evokes such a gathering, familial sense that it's hard to choose between them. Perhaps the voices win, especially when one considers the way Simon Wooldridge drops down on the line "so strange to me" on "Godawful" or the way the chorus invites you in on the second song, "For Flotsam".

If it's possible to say that an Australian band has the sound of an American Southern drawl, el Mopa has done so. It's the little way that a person from Tennessee or Georgia can lull you in with a story just by the lilt in their voice. The pleasantness of it all -- despite the fact that in several cases, el Mopa's lyrical narrative is dark and bloody -- is overwhelming. The key is that the dark and bloody elements do not lord over the story as a whole. The little vocals runs and cascading guitar sounds stir everything around.