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 post-industrial 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, and 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
rebuffed 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 Recordings’ 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.”
Cut Copy’s debut album, 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.
There are the glittering synth arpeggios and acid-squelch breakdown
on “Out There on the Ice” (the arpeggios recur throughout), plus the
upper-fret bass melodies on “Unforgettable Season.” There’s singer Dan
Whitford’s cool, restrained monotone on lead single “Lights and Music,”
and his soft, reaching croon on “So Haunted” (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.