Free Your Mind

Cut Copy have only refined their stylistic flair, festival-baiting choruses and overall command of pop songcraft on their fourth album. The results are impressive yet slightly flawed, writes EDWARD SHARP-PAUL.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Tall poppies, eh? Melbourne’s Cut Copy have slowly built up a formidable profile over their three previous albums, to the point where they suddenly stand alongside the more comet-like Tame Impala and Temper Trap as one of Australia’s leading cringe-free musical emissaries. Everyone knows the drill – this is where we get stuck into them, looking for signs of hubris or artistic decay.

Here’s the thing, though: Cut Copy have thus far managed to resist the polar pitfalls of every successful band ever – to repeat the formula for their initial success with diminishing returns, or to disappear up their own arses in a cocaine-and-double-album kind of way. You mightn’t dig them, but to hate on a band that’s successfully managed to stay on the tightrope for so long would be cruel and unusual, like killing Bambi – on the dancefloor, with a glowstick.

“What’s changed is the palette, and the scale.”

Free Your Mind features the band’s familiar strengths: songs that remain streamlined despite being crammed with hooks, textures and rhythmic information; those festival-baiting choruses; and the ability to smuggle a transcendent sadness into an otherwise uplifting dancefloor anthem. What’s changed, though, is the palette, and the scale upon which the whole thing plays out. Cut Copy have obviously conceived Free Your Mind as a start-to-finish listening experience: while typically energetic, it features peaks and strategic troughs, moments of respite. The anthems are, of course, anthemic, and destined to ignite dancefloors and festivals alike – their command of pop songcraft has grown more refined, if anything – but the album’s many interludes apply a pin-prick to all that momentum.

Then there is the matter of the mission statement/album title. It suggests a cloying hippie optimism, and that’s what singer Dan Whitford gives us, in the form of ‘reborn on the dancefloor’-type rhapsodising. It’s a smidge daggy, and it doesn’t convey any great depth, but it infuses the album with an identifiable energy of its own.

“Cut Copy have always been curators as much as artists.”

When deployed correctly, as a cool, detached presence, Whitford’s voice is an asset. When he tries to go all frontman on us, the results tend to be mixed. As on Zonoscope, there are points when Whitford pushes himself both too far in terms of technique and too far forward in the mix. Musically, here’s a distinct Second Summer of Love feel to the whole album, with piano stabs, bongo samples and acid-house rhythms adding a bucket-hatted flavour to the band’s customarily frosty electro tones. ‘Free Your Mind’ bubbles with a decidedly baggy energy – it even has one of those generic ‘soulful woman’ backing vocals – while ‘Take Me Higher’ is pure screamadelic pastiche. Elsewhere, ‘Dark Corners Mountain Tops’ and ‘Walking in the Sky’ venture into Four Tops (really) and Spiritualized terrain, respectively.

Such digressions look strange on paper, and it’s not usually a good omen when you can identify not only the artist, but the specific track that ‘inspired’ a song, but Cut Copy have always been curators as much as artists – just be thankful that they have such a discerning eye.

For the most part, anyway. The album’s interludes – the aforementioned troughs – fulfil their structural obligations, but do little else. Their snatches of film dialogue are empty signifiers: they proclaim the wished-for gravitas of Free Your Mind, but in garbled syntax. If you thought they were style-over-substance chancers from the outset, there’s nothing that will change your mind here. If, however, you appreciated them as weightless dancefloor stylists and covert pop classicists, Free Your Mind will hit the same sweet-spot.

+

‘Free Your Mind’ comes out tomorrow (Nov 1) through Modular.