In the 1980s, some strange shit was happening in Manchester,
England. New Order were increasingly incorporating
electronics and
house music into their new wave and cutting dance 12-inches, Factory
records was backing the wildly out-of-control nightclub the Hacienda,
some mates of the Happy Mondays were importing ecstasy into the city en
masse—the punks were getting turned on to club culture and its
attendant chemical pleasures.
From an ocean away, it’s tempting to imagine something similar going
down right now in Melbourne, Australia—only with better beaches
and less postindustrial gloom.
There’s Modular Recordings (a label whose name echoes Factory’s
industrial, assembly-line moniker), a hive of club-friendly, rock-ready
activity that is home to such electro acts as Van She, the Presets, New
Young Pony Club, Muscles, as well as the Avalanches and Wolfmother.
There’s that old meme Corey Delaney, the Australian party boy who
made the YouTube rounds a couple months ago after getting busted for
throwing what sounded like a rager of a house party while his parents
were away. He was shirtless, bleach-haired, and dazedly, brazenly
rebuffing the local news show’s talking head, refusing to take off his
“famous shades.” If that kid hasn’t gobbled Hacienda levels of powerful
MDMA and 4/4 thump, I’ll drink my glow stick.
Most of all, there’s Modular Records’ star band of the moment, Cut
Copy, whose fairly brilliant sophomore album, In Ghost
Colours, debuted at number one on the Australian charts.
“I don’t think we’ve ever thought of ourselves as a charting kind of
band,” says multi-instrumentalist Tim Hoey, on the phone from Sweden.
“I guess that maybe says a lot about what’s happening in Australia at
the moment. I think maybe the lines have been blurred between dance
culture and indie-rock scenes. Certainly in Melbourne, you’ve got rock
kids coming to dance clubs and dance kids going to rock shows. It’s
only been the last couple of years that our kind of music, that scene,
has really taken off. It’s always been dominated by really
middle-of-the-road, boring classic-rock music—the Vines and Jet
were the big charting bands when we started out.”
Four years ago, around the release of their debut album, Bright
Like Neon Love, Cut Copy, then the solo studio project of singer
Dan Whitford, were barely a band at all, let alone a charting one.
“None of us really knew how to play,” says Hoey. “But as [Whitford]
was writing the songs for Bright Like Neon Love, we started
doing these sort of garage-band interpretations of the songs. He took
the record to Paris to mix it, and when he came back we started playing
shows, and the whole thing snowballed from there. We just kind of
became a band.”
Bright Like Neon Love was a promising record, but it showed
audible traces of its bedroom origins. For In Ghost Colours,
the now-well-established band went to New York to record with DFA
producer Tim Goldsworthy, and the result is bigger and brighter.
“It was perfect,” says Hoey. “We wanted something that could match
not only the dance aspect of the record but the psychedelic pop stuff
we were listening to. And the stuff Tim was working on at the
time—his Loving Hand remixes and the DFA mixes—were like
these 10-minute epic tracks that went into all these weird territories
and had all this psychedelic, weird synthesizer stuff.”
Before recording, the band and producer listened to ELO’s
Time, the first Eurythmics record, My Bloody Valentine,
Spacemen 3, and “a lot of old disco” while making the record, but the
record sounds like nothing so much as New Order during their mid-’80s
peak.
There are the glittering synth arpeggios and acid-squelch breakdown
on “Out There on the Ice” (the arpeggios recur throughout); the
upper-fret bass melodies on “Unforgettable Season” and other songs;
there are the vocal house stabs on “Hearts on Fire”; there are the
guitars, faint when they feature into the picture at all, often
processed and effected into gentle washes of sound. There’s Whitford’s
cool, restrained monotone on lead single “Lights & Music” and his
soft, reaching croon on “So Haunted” and elsewhere (also like New
Order’s Bernard Sumner, Whitford has a knack for lyrics that can look
inane or just opaque on paper, but which sound sincerely sublime when
intoned over bittersweet Balearic beats, dilated at the discotheque).
There’s the album’s alternating rushes of euphoric bliss and burned-out
melancholia.
Of course, plenty of bands have followed New Order’s route from the
stage to the dance floor, but none in recent memory have done so quite
so faithfully and favorably—while still eking out a sound of
their own—
as Cut Copy. 