No other Flying Nun band has thrown so much variety at a tape recorder and seen it all stick. First time round, between 1981 and 1983, The Clean gave us the two EPs, Boodle Boodle Boodle and Great Sounds Great, two singles, Tally Ho and Getting Older, and a slew of odditties that eventually appeared on the perfectly titled release of the same name. A decade later, they were back together at their cruisiest best for the album Modern Rock, and now in 1996, Flying Nun unveils The Clean's latest musical adventure into Unknown Country.

The album was recorded and mixed in two sessions when Hamish Kilgour returned home to New Zealand from his New York home late last year and in March 1996. Hamish, his brother David and Robert Scott found plenty of instruments to play themselves — the album credits the three Clean members with playing everything from guitar and drums to thumb piano and crowtheremin — while a number of friends were invited in to contribute extra keyboards, mandolin and strings.

Over a generous helping of 18 tracks, The Clean use that instrumental variety and virtuosity to veer all the way from bang-on pop ("Twist Top'), timeless instrumental riff-riding ("Wipe Me, I'm Lucky" and "Cooking Water"), beautiful songwriter-songwriting ("Champagne & Misery" & "Valley Cab") Modern Rock-style keyboard wipe-outs ("Chumpy") to quasi-ethnic experimentation ("Balkans I" and "2", which could take their own place alongside Can's Ethnological Forgery series). And by mentioning just a few songs here, we're scraping the surface of strange name-ness that pervades the album, giving us other delights to ponder like "Franz Kafka At The Zoo", "Happy "L'il Fella" and "Get The Liquid".

Unknown Country takes in a lot more than The Clean attempted with Modern Rock. Consequently it takes a little more time to come to grips with the musical terrain that has a lot more bumps and back-tracks to it. Once again, however, The Clean have proven themselves masters of musical innovation, three guys who can only amaze when they come together and throw all their ideas down on tape. And as a mood of supreme grooviness is all-pervading on Unknown Country, The Clean can be found at their most timeless in 1996.

The group's immediate plans are to devote time to other projects (Hamish's US-based band Mad Scene have a new EP out on Merge Records, Robert is currently recording a new Magick Heads album, and David is due to begin recording a new solo album shortly) and reconvene to record one further album by The Clean sometime in 1997. The Clean story is on-again off-again purely by design — it suits The Clean's creative desires and keeps them clear of the machinery that threatened to interfere with that process from the moment they threatened to get awfully popular awfully quickly 15 years ago. This latest chapter is the most interesting yet.