For their debut mini-album, Ups & Downs capitalised on the success of their classic single “The Living Kind”, a beautiful, glistening rush of Byrdsian melancholy. Led by a great songwriter, Greg Atkinson, they understood the power of simple guitar pop to harness complex emotion, and they weren’t afraid of letting space into their songs – there’s something carefully sculpted about their writing. Ups & Downs captured what Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens once called the ‘striped sunlight sound’ peculiar to pop music from Brisbane, but there was an extra, expansive twist here, and while Sleepless suffers a little for its period-piece production, the group’s songs are so uniformly strong they still flourish.