Effervescence only lasts for so long. Over the course of ten years, three albums, countless months in the backs of vans throughout Europe and North America, the duo of Karl Smith and Pete Cohen have been progressively expanding the musical world of Sodastream from scratchy lo-fi and barely whispered mournful melancholy through to lush expansive pop with horn sections and singalongs. But now they’re home, and settled, and on Reservations, their fourth studio album, a darkness has settled in.

The plodding bass and warm viola of ‘Warm July’ drop you into Reservations in the middle of a broken relationship with a hint that Sodastream have a different story to tell this time around. By the second track, ‘Anti’—with its barely strummed guitar and mournful vocal—the indications are very clear that Reservations is taking the band to a different place.

The differences are subtle, sometimes, but where 2003’s A Minor Revival was filled with the joyous wonder of new stories and new places, all horns and soaring choruses, Reservations is the sound of a Melbourne winter, full of quick changes and cold snaps and a turn away from the grander stories of the last album to a quieter, more personal story of breakups, pain, loneliness, and the arms we defiantly put up against our seas of trouble. It is an album of sunlight just barely peaking through clouds.

Even when writing sadness and hurt, Karl Smith never turns to self-pity. There are wickedly jaunty pop tracks here of the trademark Sodastream style, all shuffling drums and bubbling basslines (‘Twin Lakes’), and there’s slow building harmony-driven melancholy (‘Reservations’), but even these songs echo with an overall sense of sadness. Many of the tracks recall the sound of early Sodastream EPs such as Practical Footwear, songs which let the barely-there instruments speak with the same weight as the vocals.

In many senses, the sound is a continuation of 2005 EP Take Me With You When You Go, arguably their finest and most musically intricate work to date. Both that EP and this new album were recorded and produced away from the studio environment in tiny bedrooms on old Macs. After collaborating with Machine Translations’ J Walker on their last album, Reservations sees Karl and Pete take over production duties.

For all the liberation that bedroom production brings you after too many years in airless studios, it’s a process fraught with risk. Reservations nearly became the great lost Sodastream album, sacrificed to the angry gods who look after portable hard drives. Were it not for a single stroke of luck, it would probably be many years before Pete could bring himself to tell the story of two dead hard drives (including the backup), one that starts with ‘the room was filled with the smell of burning electrics..’.

Karl Smith (vocals, guitar) and Pete Cohen (double bass and deeply baritone backing vocals) effortlessly jump from acoustic introspection and instrumentals to raucous singalong shanties without any hint of affectation. Even with the additions of horns, harmonicas, and the drums of Marty Brown (Art of Fighting and Clare Bowditch’s Feeding Set) on their studio albums, the core of their sound remains the same as it is live — Smith’s acoustic guitar, Pete’s driving double bass and some of the best, most beautiful songwriting to come out of Australia in years.

There are worse ways for a band from Perth, Western Australia, to start their career than to have John Peel pluck their inky cardboard debut single from the slush pile and fall in love with it. Not long after this, and for reasons they’ve never quite been able to figure, they were awarded single of the week in Melody Maker by Moby. Peel’s interest (and the rare privilege of playing a Peel session) opened doors for the band in Europe, where they spent great parts of the next several years touring through far flung countries, returning to the Melbourne cold and dingy day jobs only after the tour vans gave way and wouldn’t drive them any further.

Sodastream’s previous albums, Looks Like A Russian, The Hill for Company and A Minor Revival, along with many EPs and live recordings, have been released throughout the world on some of the most renowned indie labels including Tugboat, Rough Trade, Drive-in Records and Acuarela Discos. Over the years they have played with and supported many of their heroes and musical legends, many of whom have been labelmates along the way. They’ve shared stages with Low (at the Union Chapel), the Mountain Goats, Thalia Zedek (who collaborated on their last EP), Yo La Tengo, and Lambchop.

A love of Sodastream is never far away from being an obsession. More musically and lyrically assured than ever, Reservations takes you on a bittersweet journey, deep into the heart of what Pitchfork Media singled out as one of the most relevant Australian bands since the Go-Betweens.