For their second album, 2 Inch Tape, the group helmed by Melbourne-based musician and songwriter Simon Rigoni, have dialled back to head into their future, harking back to the days when albums were constructed as a whole: the narrative threading through each song, pulling together at the end of set, before weaving the listener’s ears back round to the start of the next row.It’s a conscious decision for Rigoni: the name of the group itself gestures toward the analog age of recording, “shunning many of the modern trends (looping, instrument emulation, pitch correction)”, he says, “and embracing practices made possible in the pre-digital era (real music/real instruments, raw/emotional performance)”. With Control, Rigoni’s production has certainly captured a full, subtle group sound, with the fourteen musicians involved all adding generous and apposite flecks of instrumentation to a core sound of guitars, bass, drums, and boy/girl duo vocals, the former from Rigoni himself.Indeed, Control represents, in some ways, a ‘stepping out of the shadows’ for Rigoni. Previously, he’d delegated vocals to others, but for Control, his charmingly colloquial singing is front and centre: “[I] only decided to do so after the original lead singer told me that for this to work, I had to sing my own songs,” he recalls, “because their strength laid in the personal nature of the song writing.” There’s a humility to his voice that sits well with the album’s overarching narrative of the mapping of relationships in their various stages, the cracks and fissures of the inter-personal, and the way we stumble, often unknowingly, through those relations.The group’s playing grapples with the fluidity of Rigoni’s song writing perfectly: there’s confidence in the way they navigate the pan-generic play of the songs. You can hear various touchstones – the two-chord strum of opening “Our Love”, coupled with Rigoni’s dry delivery, recalls solo Lou Reed, maybe one of his great yet lesser-known albums like Coney Island Baby; the pedal steel and Rhodes that colour the contours of “That’s Me” hark back to the alt-country of Gram Parsons or Gene Clark, before the song skips, momentarily, into a clipped ska glide. (Remarkably, it works.)There are other unexpected turns, like the flute and violin miniature that opens first single “Automaton Girl”, which could have fallen from a ‘70s library music album, before an electric guitar comes crashing in, and twisted electronics send the song off onto a ferocious rock groove. The closing “Find Away”, in comparison, is a tender sign-off, full of pause and restraint – a comedown for an album that’s designed to be taken in one setting, where the shifts in genre, in focus, and in tone, tie together to bind Control into a weave of wonder.