There are realisations like Little Red’s Midnight Remember. The realisation is one of affirming a belief in music – it’s a belief that pop music can make you smile, make you think of driving along a winding country road, appreciating life in all its multi-hued brilliance.
It’s the little things in life that make it worth living. Like realising that people who, with a faux, self-deprecating half laugh, smugly smirk that they get embarrassed by Junior MasterChef. Well, so they fucking should be – they’re obviously a mouth-breather and can’t cook as well as a kid that I could lift up and throw at you… but more importantly, they’ve got nothing better to do than watch Junior MasterChef. Or it’s like realising that trying to figure out the plotline of The Expendables is as pointless as figuring out what the hell the deal is with David Zayas.
Those little realisations are the lifeblood of keeping a vigil against the darkness of fuck-headedness. It’s similar to shrugging your shoulders at the recent election result and realising, that yes, about half of the 16-odd million Australians able to vote are conservative dipshits and you may want out of a country where half the population are essentially lackwits all searching for the next dollar and remembering how it used to be in the ‘good old days’. Hell, they’re probably the same fuckheads watching Junior MasterChef and scratching themselves while thinking that their lives are worth living before going to shop at Coles on Tuesday. And not cheering when the billions of ridiculous explosions in The Expendables are taking up more screen time than the botoxed brow of Sylvester Stallone.
Then there are realisations like Little Red’s Midnight Remember. The realisation is one of affirming a belief in music – it’s a belief that pop music can make you smile, make you think of driving along a winding country road, appreciating life in all its multi-hued brilliance. It’s enough to wash away the anger and frustration that contemporary life – here’s looking at you, media and politics– brings about.
For a band as comparatively pristine as Little Red to have even crafted a record as confident and tempered as Midnight Remember must be appreciated. Their debut was charming in its naiveté, but that they acknowledged that and strove to create an entirely new blueprint for them to work from was a crucial move; they easily could’ve stuck to their guns and appeased their many fans with a record of ‘50s doo-wop rock. The easy, conservative way. One that would’ve paid off in the short tem. Instead, they’ve taken the hard road, and the results are all the better for them in the long run – Midnight Remember is a record that points at there being far more behind Little Red than many would’ve realised.
Sure there’s eye-opening guitar-driven jangle-pop episodes like Little Bit Of Something which fins Little Red at their chugging Motown boy-group harmonies best, but those incidents are few. Instead there’s sparkling widescreen pop like Forget About Your Man and the ragtime, big-band groove of Lazy Boy. In My Bed’s country inflections are charming and showcase a new songwriting element in the Little Red dynamic, as does All Mine’s slow-burn balladry that gives Cloud Control a run for their money. Or there’s the brilliantly sparse Follow You There, finding Little Red – and all five of Adrian, Tom, Quang, Taka and Dominic chop and change the vocal work across the record to great effect – striving to find that perfect pop melody. Holy hell – Going Wrong almost sounds like Billy Joel song, but it’s one of the few instances when that sentence is a good thing.
That’s not to say Midnight Remember or Little Red are sounding nostalgic though; moments like I Can’t Wait or Slow Motion sound like they’re soundtracking memories of a life you’ve never lived, but at least one you aspire to lead. It’s similar to where the genius of Fleetwood Mac and Husker Du lies – not looking back and paying homage to bands per se, rather employing disparate elements of pop music to craft and create a band-specific, almost talismanic sound. Across thirteen tracks, where there’s barely a moment of them repeating themselves, that’s a talisman they’ve found.
That’s what Midnight Remember is – it’s Little Red, free to challenge themselves in striding forward, rather than resting on their laurels. Therein lies the sheer brilliance of a tune so ubiquitously catchy as Rock It and how that tune – while not musically indicative of the remainder of Midnight Remember – sums up the record ideally. Recording with Scott Horscroft (Presets, The Panics, Birds Of Tokyo) revamping and discovering themselves as a band has paid excessive dividends. They realised that when you’re motivated to bring out one’s own best features – and Rock It is one of the best singles you’ll hear anywhere – more often than not, you can create something exceptional. That’s exactly what Midnight Remember is. One of the most exceptional Australian pop releases in memory. It’s the musical realisation that – just as you feel when listening to the album itself – life is alright.
