- Treehouse are a three-piece from Tasmania who’ve been together since high school and it shows. They know their dynamic well. From the opening slide guitar riff of Centre of the World we’re transported back to a time when guitars mattered in rock music. “Everyone’s the centre of their world, they choose to study through their own hell”. This isn’t dole-wave. There’s anger and passion behind the words. There’s also a certain kind of dark humour which, for me, brings to mind the Canadian band Ought.

The production is fairly low key. It sounds like a lot of the album could’ve been recorded live with some basic guitar overdubs. Sometimes it’s hard to tell on which songs the guitar has been doubled and which they’ve been split left and right and effected in different ways.

“It’s so nice to play guitar in the rain” they sing on Hammer on the Door over some pretty solid '90’s style riffing. Other lyrics come in and out of focus in an obtuse way, creating scenes that could be interpreted a thousand different ways. The crux of what the band's doing, though, really is in the guitar work.

There are times on the release when they sound like early Dinosaur Jr. and times where they seem to owe as much to early emo music. On Between Two Shoulders they almost sound like Joy Division with a fevered frontman. The bass gets dirty but never showy, which suits the driving rhythm of the drumming, especially on tracks like first single She’s A Mystic.

Tidal Wash is the EP's proper ending (not including the live version of Set Free, a track from their previous release Gathering The Dreams which comes as a bonus and it’s a very sombre, droning end to an otherwise fairly steady release. I guess last tracks are supposed to be slow though, right?

Treehouse cover quite a lot of ground, but there's a unifying theme here. Put simply, they're well worth checking out for anyone who has held onto their belief in the possibilities of the traditional three-piece rock band.

- Nathan Kearney.