Over the years I’ve made my fondness for ’90s Midwestern indie rock overwhelmingly apparent. My record collection is populated with bands like Hum, Castor, Shiner, C-Clamp, Honcho Overload, Braid, Love Cup, Zoom, Boys Life, Giants Chair, Dis-, and Ring, Cicada—groups that shared members, tours, labels, producers, hometowns, and sonic touchstones. This latticework of connections is bound together by a consistent quality: I’m more likely to spin one of these records a second time than turn it off early.

Given that my interest in these bands started a thousand miles away from the Midwest when I was growing up in marginally upstate New York, it shouldn’t be a surprise that kindred spirits could pop up on the far side of the globe, too. Perth, Australia’s Rob Schifferli and Martin Allcock first appeared in the slowcore outfit Braving the Seabed at the turn of the millennium, releasing their lone self-titled album on Sun Sea Sky in 2000. Their next group, the Melbourne-based Minor Ache, amplified the math-rock tension brewing beneath the careful passages on their only release, 2005’s Black Hours Surround You. After returning to Perth, they joined up with bassist Paul Haimes and drummer Chris Reimer in The Leap Year, issuing With a Little Push a Pattern Appears back in 2007.

Unlike their previous groups, The Leap Year is poised to release that elusive second album sometime in the near future, but Australian label Hobbledehoy’s recent reissue of With a Little Push… underscores what the album shares with releases from Castor, C-Clamp, and Giants Chair. It straightens out the rhythms from Minor Ache’s Black Hours Surround You and brings in more anthemic, openly cathartic choruses, but the basic ingredients remain the same. It’s a welcome mix of the languid, minor-key melodies of Castor’s self-titled debut, the carefully crafted distortion of C-Clamp’s Meander + Return, and the underlying tension of Giants Chair’s Purity and Control. What sets it apart from those Midwestern reference points is The Leap Year’s penchant for blowing up that introspection with the energetic gang vocals of “The Rational Anthem” (video) and “This Is a Setup” and the painting-outside-the-lines emotional peaks of “The Idea,” “Let It Go Let It Go” (mp3), and “Big Rock.”

I hesitate to put too much emphasis on The Leap Year as the Midwestern Australian band, since the most notable tie to that era and region is the ongoing durability of With a Little Push a Pattern Appears. Each of the album’s seven songs is made for the long-haul. The aforementioned songs haven’t strayed far from my listening pile since I first heard them. With a Little Push definitely earned its reissue.

One drawback of The Leap Year’s geographical origins has been the difficulty of importing their physical wares, but fortunately Hobbledehoy passed along copies of the vinyl pressing of With a Little Push a Pattern Appears to Interpunk. I received mine this weekend and true to form, it’s earned repeated spins on my turntable, each echoed by the final line of “Big Rock”: “Discover again.” Hopefully they’ll do the same for The Leap Year’s next album.