Melbourne’s Skipping Girl Vinegar returns in 2011 with their single ‘Here She Comes’, released as a three-song “mini EP” (the format is similar to physical single releases – remember them?) after the successes of singles and debut album Sift The Noise in previous years. This is a great look in for anyone unfamiliar with the band, showcasing three completely different sides in under ten minutes.

The focus here is, of course, the title track and lead single. It begins with the soft (and apparently unedited) chirrup of birds – which lasts throughout the song – before launching into a jangly, summery tune driven by soft percussion and rollicking banjo strums. The structure of the chorus, with its “ba ba ba”s, is rather typical and yet it works well, and you’ll be humming it before you can say “you know this love will last”. It’s a little slice of summer heaven bound to keep some warmth around as we slide into the colder months.

‘Sketches of Under the Weather’ follows in a starkly different vein, strings now taking the forefront sitting against the continual drive of the banjo and steady piano pushes. There’s something quite dark about it and no noise has been omitted, making it quite an honest listen in all its bareness. It enters a breakdown where silence is used in replacement of sound with quite effective results as the instruments leak back in atmospherically and the strings die just as they reach an angry-sounding tremolo rise. No words on this track and none needed – a thinker.

Final track ‘Bullets and Mango Trees’ was originally written for the refugee awareness album The Key of Sea as a collaboration with refugee Tri Nguyen (no relation, most common Vietnamese surname ever!). I don’t usually like to get personal when reviewing music, but this is quite obviously a topic that is tremendously close to my heart, being the child of refugee parents who came to Australia from Vietnam by boat in 1980, and so the fact that this track is rooted in exactly what I am means everything to me and caught me completely off guard. Before I read about its origins, I thought its beginning sounded familiar – turns out it does, because it’s a recording of a Vietnamese Buddhist ceremony (as a part of a traditional Buddhist family, I grew up going to temples regularly and I know those sounds off by heart). But enough about me – the track. It’s a spoken word alternative to the track on The Key of Sea and is carried, after the opening, by an acoustic guitar married with a verse spoken by Nguyen and simple sung chorus, fleshed out with a larger instrumental section.

Actually, hey – can’t talk about it without talking about me, because right now I’m sitting at my desk with a book about boat people in front of me that my dad gave me yesterday, in a house that my parents bought after working their arses off when they came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and here’s a song that tries to understand completely the struggles that my parents – and the Vietnamese people – went through. I can’t actually express how much that means to me, especially considering that I’ve tried so many times to explain to people I know that conditions in Vietnam were (and are) not perfect, and that there’s nothing funny about telling me or my family to “get back on the boat”, that you might enjoy going on holiday to Vietnam but that there’s a reason everything there is so cheap – and this is not like any Australian song I’ve heard before. Please give this a listen if you want to try and understand more about what my family went through, what so many of the people closest to me went through. This is so important. Beautiful.

So it turns out that a “mini EP” sent to my desk at work by a band I knew very little about has not only a super fun pop anthem on it, but also a song that resonates incredibly with me. Hey Skipping Girl Vinegar, congrats on the sweet single and thank you so much for taking me completely by surprise.