Last year’s gloriously messy Go Easy revealed that there was more to the racket made by Brisbane upstarts Blank Realm than trashy noise-rock and Aussie wailing. The album went beyond the junkie surf and jangly viscosity native to the region’s rock of the last decade. Daniel and Sarah Spencer are well-versed in what was happening in the decades prior to that in and around their continent and use it to good measure by hooking their line to the jangly legacy of Flying Nun bands like The Clean and The Chills, but never exactly sounding like any of it. Equal parts mellifluous and roughhewn, Blank Realm’s charm is the fact that they can drift in and out of such spheres.

With Grassed Inn (Fire Records), those shifts still remain, though more often than not there’s a determined focus on sharpening up the beautiful qualities of their pop impurities. “Falling Down the Stairs” is the obvious choice in trying to define this increased skip towards melody and thrift. Again, The Clean come to mind, but so does the “Learning to Fly” riff of Tom Petty fame, as the song’s built for the more ragged selections of ’80s Top 40 radio, but is also capable of falling apart in any of its ramshackle twist and turns. That same blast of pop nostalgia coats “Reach You on the Phone” with a glistening haze that even stretches into something that could be found on a John Hughes soundtrack. None of this is new for Blank Realm, mind you, it was just discriminately buried on Go Easy. Here it’s as if the band is searching for the next level, wherever that may be.

Still, Blank Realm prefers to jam infinite and muck up the periphery more than they do reveling in singles. Most of these songs are never clearly cut and amble about in the best way possible. “Bulldozer Love” is eight-plus minutes of superfluity, with Sarah Spencer dissecting the presets on her synth until the sounds disintegrate into the gauze of guitars. Elsewhere, it’s her electronic canoodling that presents Blank Realm with a best of both worlds scenario. At one end of the spectrum, this is an album rife with hooks and sing-alongs. On the other, it’s a noble experiment. Who says you can’t have it all?