Born Sandy Devotional by Triffids

Born Sandy Devotional, the Triffids' second album, surfaced in March 1986, and it's the record where the Perth band made the empty spaces of home sound as big as the sky. They cut it at Mark Angelo Studios in London in August 1985, co-producing with Gil Norton, then mixed it at Amazon Studios in Liverpool that September: a band from the far side of the world conjuring its home coast in someone else's city.

David McComb's songs are melancholy and wide-screen, steeped in isolation and the bleak, beautiful vastness of the Australian countryside. "Wide Open Road" is the one everybody knows, and it seems to stretch to the horizon. Even the sleeve looks homeward, with a photograph of Mandurah, Western Australia, as it was in 1961. Its reputation has only grown: a television series on great Australian albums featured it in 2007, and in 2010 a book of the country's best records ranked it 5th.

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