'For The Birds' is a record that sees The Mess Hall heading towards a new kind of beatnik soul that is very much their own.  Every song is infused with a gritty kind of beauty, a surfeit of swing and sense of experimentation that is a natural progression from everything they achieved on their previous release, 'Devils Elbow' (winner of the Australian Music Prize in 2007). That album set the band apart as one who create their own world and fill it with narratives of the broken, the forgotten, the misunderstood, and very occasionally, the redeemed, and here those themes are refined and expanded upon.