Recently reissued through Kill Shaman, the same East Bay imprint that brought you the Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin collabo earlier this year, the Moles 1991 album isn’t even tangentially related to garage styles. And for whatever reason, the vast majority of prose spilled on Untune the Sky figures the band as some sort of chamber pop band. There’re problems with that as well, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Fronted by Richard Davies, whose recorded a great deal subsequent to the dissolution of the Moles, the band was basically an extension of his composerly penchants. With a sprawling track listing, here augmented by the addition of a single, there is present a good deal of everything. But tagging the band as anything but tangentially related to pop music is an easy way out of describing what’s going on here.

Tracks like “This is a Happy Garden” might be able to pass for something that accidentally found its way onto the radio during the nineties. But the purposefully drab tonality of it all removes it from comparison to the Beach Boys or whatever other group one might connect with well orchestrated pop. In mentioning that California group, “Breathe Me In” almost solidifies a tie between this Australian group and the better known ensemble. Of course, Pavement might be just as good a reference point – for the music, but not the vocals.

It’s all pop music, I suppose, if Guided by Voices counts as a pop group. And it kind of does.

The Moles’ desire to wrangle just about any strain of rock related music, though, is an admirable approach to take. There weren’t too many groups capacious of wringing some truly distorted rock progressions out of its instruments and marrying them to some sweetly sung, if not occasionally deadpan, vocals.

With this counting as the third release of Untune the Sky, no one should be expected the Moles to suddenly become a significantly influential ensemble. What it will do, though, is to give Kill Shaman a release which finds itself lauded in the independent press.

Taking a chance on a business proposition (which is what releasing records is, after all) such as this should find the label making a few bucks. But waiting for the album to crop up on message boards and auction sites after the pressing runs out is surely going to make for a pricey item.