THE Sleepy Jackson, from Perth, Australia, opened their account earlier this year with a mini-album, a sketchy, scratchy lo-fi sampler of eight songs.

It's Jo And Danny, from a barn retreat in Brecon, Wales, did the same in 2000, when releasing their self-produced, self-financed Lank Haired Girl To Bearded Boy. Both records were oddball, joyful and subversive, both rambled through myriad styles reminiscent of others yet were still distinctive and amusingly wilful.

Thankfully this spirit of adventure is still roaming free on the two bands' playful new records.

The Sleepy Jackson's Luke Steele, a maverick with an uncompromising habit of sacking band members, says Lovers is a shamelessly commercial record and vows never to be such a compliant whore again, but how compliant is he in reality? There is whimsy at work as he stretches his Aussie take on country blues into psychedelia, electronic pop and George Harrison songs circa 1971: a capricious need for adventure that pays off.

Once Celtic childhood sweethearts, now husband and wife, Jo Bartlett and Danny Hagan have cut back on their predilection for psychedelic interludes, focusing instead on their ramshackle gift for hippie melancholia on It's Jo And Danny's third album of pining folk pop. Recorded in the Welsh mountains, their sleepy songs are still as home-made as village-fete jam and as fresh and incomplete as a child's drawing. Bartlett's vocals drift by like a summer cloud; just add birdsong, a buzzing bee and a country stream to complete the pastoral canvas.

Updated: 12:12 Thursday, July 17, 2003