For the duration of their 16-year existence, from 1993 to 2009, the Lucksmiths had an aesthetic so focused and so unvarying they may as well have been Motörhead, a band with whom they could never be confused. The songs collected on this retrospective are almost totally of a piece: singer/drummer Tali White's tremulous-lad tenor (with its undisguised Australian accent) and pitty-pat percussion; chief songwriter Marty Donald's clear, clean guitar tone; and wry lyrics about various shades of emotional ache, featuring the kind of wordplay that tends to come from people who can both define "zeugma" and provide an example ("I can't see the florist for the flowers/ And I can't see the point in hanging 'round.") On a first approximation, "Jewel Thieves" is the only one of the 35 songs here that's not about frail male heteroromantic yearning or musing on surroundings or both.
The Lucksmiths were, in other words, the exemplars of a certain kind of deliberately anti-macho indie-pop, and they made no secret of which bands they hearted most: the like-minded, much more short-lived, mostly British acts that had been connected to Sarah Records and the C86 scene. Their fan base was fanatical; their formula was durable. And their Indie 4Eva attitude was largely untempered by their models' and contemporaries' exploration outside their perfumed garden. There's very little on Cartography for Beginners that branches out like the Housemartins' stabs at a cappella gospel, Belle and Sebastian's salutes to Northern soul, or Trembling Blue Stars' bleak eroticism; the horn section on "The Golden Age of Aviation" can trace its lineage to New Orleans only by way of the Cure's "Close to Me".
They were cloistered, but they were devout. The Lucksmiths' kind of artistic evolution meant a slow, steady improvement in craft—suppler melodies, slyer puns, more carefully wrought observations—so this is the rare decade-plus retrospective where the later songs beat the early ones. (The addition of second guitarist Louis Richter for their last few albums helped a lot, too.) They broke up amicably enough that they played a farewell tour and recorded a farewell single that's close to a career peak ("Get-to-Bed Birds", the gentlest of valedictions, about staying up too late on New Year's Eve); 3/4 of them went on to start a new band, Last Leaves, together.
All of which is good news, and any first-rank Lucksmiths song is a delightful addition to a mix tape. (Cassette tape, please. This is a band that recorded a song called "The Cassingle Revival" in all seriousness, or as close as a perpetually self-ironizing band could get to all seriousness.) But two straight hours of this stuff can get maddening. Hearing White croon couplets like "I went a fortnight without email/ Then a postcard scant of detail" is splendid in the context of other kinds of songs—a badges-and-anoraks corrective to polished bravado, heavy beats, real and fake American accents. Then he rhymes "Pacific" with "heliolithic," quips "don't let the barstools get you down," remarks "she's all heart but I'm all thumbs"—and eventually it starts sounding uncomfortably like what they love most isn't the romantic partners for whom they perpetually claim they're longing, or the fisherman's-knot melodies they were constantly refining, but their own cleverness and purity of purpose.
