*LIVE REVIEW*

Augie March @ The Garage, London Mon 3rd November 2003

"I love you like I love my own skin" is a baldly emotional sentiment you don't hear very often. But then again, Augie March make the kind of music you don't hear very often either - sadly literally, since the Melbourne five-piece's two fantastic albums are extremely hard to find in the UK (the balance will be redressed by the 2004 British release of second album Strange Birds), and tonight is their English live debut.

Singer Glenn Richards is slightly nervous at first, and worries aloud that the gig's 80% Antipodean audience might not do the band any favours. But 90 merry-go-round minutes later, all bets are off, as Augie March prove to be Australia's most effortlessly impressive musical export since The Avalanches. They see-saw from the vertiginous, woozy balladry of "The Night Is A Blackbird" to magnificent Caveish torch songs like "Song In The Key Of Chance" - an exhilarating rush of unconventional time signatures tempered by a finely-honed sense of melody.

Augie March sure know the dramatic power of a well-placed chord progression, and if that makes them sound like dullard music theorists, one look at the fire in Richards's eyes during "The Offer" gives the lie to such notions. On tonight's showing, Augie March would be equally at home on the All Tomorrow's Parties bill or mopping up disenfranchised Coldplay fans, such is their versatility and naturally welcoming air of bonhomie. Simply incredible Sigur-Ros-play-Dylan encore "The Hole In Your Roof" leaves a couple of hundred adoring Aussies and freshly converted Brits in little doubt: the 'March will be unstoppable, given half a chance.