Five years is a long time, and it feels like even longer if it’s a sophomore album you’re waiting on. Though, I can understand this ‘side project’ of prolific guitarist and engineer Mikey Young, also featuring members of the Onyas, may have been delayed a little by the burgeoning success of that other little band of his, Eddy Current Suppression Ring.
The follow up to 2008’s refreshingly delightful Romance And Adventure, this eponymous release is an eclectic affair; in its first ten minutes it throws me shades of Split Enz, Lou Reed and The Stooges. The spectrum doesn’t really get any broader than that.
Oh wait, yes it does. By the time the epic Sex In The Chillzone appears at the back end of the album, we’re in super jam-out territory, with lackadaisical-yet-still-somewhat-hammy vocals guiding us through stabbing guitar wails and grooving low-end synth. Then the intensity shifts upwards to forge what is easily the most bizarrely entertaining one-two hit on the record – the Numan-esque The Studio Of My Mind sees the guitars replaced by handclaps, the synth get darker, and the vocals wake right up, droning lines like ‘Then I saw your silhouette and I seized/He is willing me on into the trees/He knows about the studio /Of my mind.’ It gets better from there as well.
I’m hoping the next twisted palette from Young and company doesn’t take five years to assemble, but if it’s this diverse, with as much creativity crammed in, then I guess I don’t mind.
BY MATT PANAG
Best Track: The Studio Of My Mind
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Those three bands I mentioned together earlier. Plus a bit of Onyas and Eddy Current.
In A Word: Satisfying
