In Ghost Colours, the 2008 album from Cut Copy, is to New Order as Zonoscope, the latest album from Cut Copy, is to, like, Duran Duran. This is more or less intended as a compliment! Where the last album trafficked in the lockstep dance precision of the artists formerly known as Joy Division, Zonoscope dives hard into glorious pop cheese. It's a much more goofy, unself-conscious affair - it's not a stretch to imagine that dudes toked and pretended to sing like Billy Idol for a while (really - see "Blink and You'll Miss a Revolution") then listened to the tapes later and decided it didn't sound half bad. And it doesn't! I'm not going to say exactly that the band is better off for their more shaggy-dog approach to the record, but the album has more than a few points where it's damn near irresistible - songs like "Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat" and "Need You Now" are John-Cusack-with-a-boombox-outside/The-Human-League level corny, but it feels churlish to resist them given how fun they are.
The album does deviate from my opening analogy at a few key points, in detours that do and don't work. The best left turn is "Where I'm Going", where the band decides to ditch synthesizers completely and write a straightforward guitar pop song, which ends up sounding like a superlative unearthed British Invasion b-side. Then there's the last two songs on the album, "Corner of the Sky", and the 15-minute long "Sun God", which aim at a more straightforward 4/4 homage to 90s house (I think? All you house-heads would know better than me). "Corner of the Sky" is brief and appealing, and "Sun God" isn't exactly objectionable, but it seems clear that these guys are more fun as pop maestros than as extended dance-vamp DJs. Outsize ambition doesn't particularly suit these guys* - they're never been about much more than refining nostalgic sounds until they come up with pop diamonds. That's no small feat, of course - and it's great to see a band mining the past with as much care and skill as this Australian duo.
*I seem to remember Andy having a pretty great theory about "Hearts on Fire", the first single of In Ghost Colours, as some kind of meta-commentary on the history of dance music, although the details of his interpretation escape me. Andy?
Cut Copy - "Need You Now"
Need You Now by cutcopymusic
Cut Copy - "Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat"
Cut Copy - "Where I'm Going"
No Age - "Fever Dreaming" (dir. by Patrick Daughters)
No Age - Fever Dreaming from Sub Pop Records on Vimeo.
Martin Scorsese once said that "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out." The latest music video from director Patrick Daughters delightfully does away with the second half of that dictum, as Daughters wields the edges of his frame like razor blades and wrecking balls. Daughters is one of the true visionaries working in the music video form (best known for his one-take Feist videos, but truly great because of his Depeche Mode and Department of Eagles videos), in part because he likes to merge thought-provoking cinema-theory gimmicks with a truly gleeful spirit of filmmaking. The "Fever Dreaming" video revels in its carnage, and it also comes up with the best macabre joke/jolt of an ending since Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer. All that said - No Age guitarist Randy Randall needs to get over his thing about climbing on top of things to play guitar on them, which he has done at every single live show of his I've been to (which, for various circumstances, has been far more shows than I actually wanted to see) and is now dragging into his videos. It's a little played out, bro!
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