Damien Binder: Bright Side (digital outlets)

If you consider the artists expat singer-songwriter Damien Binder has been favourably compared with – moody Springsteen, the Triffids, Jackson Browne, Lloyd Cole, the Go-Betweens – you'll see the high level at which he works, and the regard in which he's held.

Of his 2016 album New World we said, “he writes songs which in a better world would find themselves all over radio” and noted the album walked a canny line between singer-songwriter and power pop.

He's never delivered a flat album, always a collection of rewarding songs cleanly producedwhich are often immediately engaging for that pop-rock component but with the lyrical depth of a crafted singer-songwriter.

For example Everything But, the third track on this fine collection: it drives along like thrumming adult rock rising out of a broody synth backdrop, hits an addictive forward momentum which is both tense and appealing, avoids an obvious chorus but carries the listener as it swells and the guitars start to jangle.

Then the dynamics shift, it becomes spare and quiet before it surges ahead again.

Not a moment wasted in a song where the singer considers what he's got (luck, fight, pluck) although in growing older realises he's had everything but . . .

Just seeing where this life goes.

It's the kind of song which stands at a midpoint between early Jackson Browne and late-period Tom Petty or Roger McGuinn.

Binder was the mainman in the New Zealand indie.rock band Second Child (opening for Fugazi, Nirvana, Jesus and Mary Chain among others), was nominated for a Silver Scroll songwriting award, relocated to Sydney and Bright Side is his fifth solo album.

With a taut band, spacious and crisp production by Matt Gio and a sharp collection of songs which offer surging guitar jangle (the title track which is an in-character song and has some of Browne's slightly detached delivery, Touchdown), classy AOR radio pop (Connected, Back to Me), acoustic-framed shuffle (Start This Heart), a ballad in a wash of synths (One More Time) and moody visions (There For the Taking).

Don't Know What – which owes a debt to Neil Finn – is one of those songs which, in a better world, would be . . .

Because he has long been absent from these shores, Damien Binder will probably struggle to get the attention for this album that it deserves.

But here it is, yet another collection of intelligent, crafted, adult music with soul and sinew.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here