Fabulous Diamonds: Fabulous Diamonds II

Australia’s Fabulous Diamonds certainly don’t believe in hurrying into anything. It takes six and a half minutes of thumping drum and droning keyboards before singer/drummer Nisa Venerosa makes her first vocal appearance on “1”, the opening number from the duo’s second album, “II”. (I’m seeing a trend here.) Listening to the 12-plus minutes of this song is something of a litmus test: will you get impatient and yank the disc in favor of something livelier, or will you allow yourself to get sucked in to its spacey, droney stew?

Venerosa’s bandmate, Jarrod Zlatic, provides the other sounds on the record besides voice and drums. Those sounds tend to be of the keyboard variety. The five songs here total 33 minutes and are rife with chanted vocals and repetitive, interwoven synth lines. Depending on the litmus test mentioned above, the listener will find them either hypnotic or maddeningly dull. Me, I fall onto the “hypnotic” side of that equation, but if Venerosa had a stronger voice, it would be an easier argument to make.