Australia's best-kept secret trio The Necks do what any "new music" ensemble does best: confound expectations. Bypassing genre so entirely — jazz not jazz, ambient not ambient, un-electronic but sometimes sounding as such — that unless you file your records alphabetically you won't have the slightest idea where to place them, The Necks dare you reinterpret the words "improvisation" and "jazz", recasting such musics from a wizard's smelt of exotic molds. Those timid of the 'J' word who have held the group at arm's length out of categorical trepidation are doing themselves a vast disservice — not only are The Necks producing some of the most enthralling music on the planet, their already lengthy back catalog seems to function as one gigantic prelude. In other words, this is a band that has yet to plateau.

Though wildly extrapolating on the basic piano/bass/drums paradigm, early Necks records such as Sex and Next tentatively poked and prodded at the jazz envelope, unsure of their footing. Odd duck recordings they were, and undoubtedly the group operated way out on stylistic limbs even then, but the over-arching fascination with abstraction and texture nevertheless took some time to firm itself up. On Townsville, the ear never questions what it's hearing: the piano/bass/drum triptych is in full effect (and mastered with a clarity that makes them sparkle like irradiated diamonds), the record, in fact, blossoming out of a characteristically morose bass figure from Lloyd Swanton, until Chris Abrahams' kaleidoscopic piano cascades across the spectrum amongst Tony Buck's equally diaphanous cymbal massages. From out of this seemingly innocuous beginning, where notes seem to hover about the studio, crystallizing, the trio work the 50 minute-plus sonic envelope into a veritable raga of brim and vigor, piano and cymbal clusters volleying over Swanton's bass-ic cliff edges with the gravity defying force of an avalanche. Though the trio acrobatically trade licks with the poise one might attribute to that of a finely-tuned ballet, they vary their tumbling sounds to achieve a mantra-esque trance-fusion that suggests what Steve Reich might do if he shifted his sensibilities towards the realms of improv. Townsville is yet another gorgeous piece of work — as it is, every time this trio stick their Necks out, shockwaves of discontent ripple across genre academe's complacent bandwidths.