There’s been talk of
Miami Horror being some “psychedelic indie-electronic” hybrid, but there’s not much psych on the Melbourne act’s long-gestating first album. As for electronics, a shift from one-man creations to full-band tours means more live instrumentation than ever. What this is, then, is wide-screen pop with spongy synths and retro-disco flourishes. More often than aiming for the dancefloor, these songs recall the soft, summery swoon of chillwave, only without the micro-genre’s no-budget bite. That’s not a complaint – more a simple fact of shared influences – but it does make for an album stranded somewhere between pleasantly distracting and numbingly transient.
A bit of a marathon at 14 fairly long songs,
Illumination leisurely ticks a handful of boxes: a couple of spacey instrumentals, cameos from Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo, hazy segues, breezily evocative song titles, and some percolating disco workouts. The latter come off quite well, between the blissful ‘Summersun’, the half-urgent ‘Ultraviolet’, and the single ‘I Look To You’; a minor miracle of bubbling bass and Chic melodies, co-written by Dappled Cities’ Tim Derricourt and featuring a candy-coated vocal turn by Melbourne singer Kimbra. The album could have used several more songs like this, although perhaps that would have gotten in the way of the thoughtful daze founder/frontman Benjamin Plant is looking to curate here.
Some tasteful New Order influence surfaces on the more dance-minded ‘Sometimes’, while Swedish singer MAI brings a faint melancholy to the nagging synth line of ‘Echoplex’ and some Ratatat guitar tickles ‘Imagination (I Want You To Know)’. The endearingly cheesy single ‘Moon Theory’ finds a happy medium between navel-gazing introspection and throbbing pop grandeur, and the appropriately titled ‘Soft Light’ matches Plant’s gentle smear of a voice with dreamy trappings and a persistent thrust that wouldn’t be out of character for Dappled Cities. All of these tunes are enjoyable enough while they’re unfolding, yet each slips immediately into the ether the moment the next is loaded and released.
That’s the problem Plant needs to address with his future output: how to weave his likeable, easygoing musical whims into something as indelible as ‘I Look To You’.
Words by Doug Wallen. More at
thevine.com.au.