Return

Collarbones’ third album confirms them as frontrunners in Australia’s growing pack of electronic auteurs, writes CHRISTOPHER LEWIS.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] There are not many artists who successfully borrow as much from Usher as they do from Burial, but Collarbones never sounded much like anything else on iTunes. Forever forward thinking in their reappropriation of pop music, the existential crisis for the band in 2014 was how to stay avant-garde in a musical landscape moving so fast around them.

If Return is their answer, they’ve solved their own riddle through introspection, because instead of leaping forward again from Die Young and Iconography, their third LP represents a refinement of their existing ideals and aesthetics. It feels like Collarbones have now fully realised the conceptual identity that they forged in its earliest incarnation with 2009’s Waiting for the Ghosts. Sonically atmospheric, with fragments of late-’90s industrial and R’n’B, mid-2000s electronica and even a nod and a wink to Mr West’s 808s & Heartbreak, Return seeks to straddle that most delicate balance between ambient synthesis and pop sensibilities. They succeed by coupling that ideological clarity with a reckless abandon in execution.

Opening with a shimmering wall of discord, ‘100 Nights’ builds to a panic-inducing, metronomic thunderclap. It could happily sit on Clint Mansell’s soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream, but as terrifying as it might be, the ketamine sinkhole effect draws the listener in like a tractor beam. If Marcus Whale and Travis Cook wanted to gain attention, they achieved their aim.

But this opening instrumental is the anomaly; the dreamlike soundscapes on Return are not blurred into anonymity, due mostly to Whale’s persistence with his vocals. Not to say Cook’s sonic palette ever alienates his listener; rather, the two work together harmoniously to entice their audience in and it’s the voice of Whale that keeps the humanity within their sound.

‘Sinking (Deeper)’ shares a space somewhere between the scattered trip-hop-infected alleys of Bristol and the crooning street corners of Brooklyn, with Marcus aurally crunched like a distorted cousin of The Weeknd. The percussion slowly ramps up to rave bpms and, instead of sinking deeper, heart palpitations ensue and the song tumbles down a rabbit hole of strobe lighting whilst Whale echoes out the word ‘deeper…’ into oblivion.

“It’s brave enough to be experimental and step outside the pop prism.”

It’s brave enough to be experimental and step outside the pop prism, but what impresses the most throughout Return is the manoeuvring that both Cook and Whale achieve throughout each song, marking not just a single idea off their list but transiently moving through many with seamless fluidity. Think of what Grimes achieved with Visions or what Caribou did with Swim and this album is definitely within shooting range.

A song like ‘Flush’ begins with breathless vocals and apocalypse drums, but as it progresses it teases its listener with restless percussion and a wall of sound that refuses to solidify. And as the hollow drum machines become inescapable, Whale’s voice raises in volume, heightening the mood to a remarkable crescendo. Conversely ‘I Would, I Will’ favours a more direct approach, painting a target in between the listener’s eyes and professing “You are the air I breathe” in a such a lovelorn state that it would make Drake blush.

Oscar Key Sung’s presence on ‘Only Water’ is a welcome play on the cliché “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” as he duets with Whale in what could be Australia’s Rumble in the Jungle for Antipodean serenading. But it doesn’t work. What must’ve looked like a brilliant idea on paper fails principally because the two vocalists clutter the track and alongside what sounds like a Sega Mega Drive being sampled, it’s just too overcooked. ‘Soldier’, however, is the slow jam that works, and it’s indicative of the new Australian New Wave, with Collarbones showing they are just as happy to borrow from their ANZUS allies as they are from their old colonial motherland.

“Their ability to attack pop from nine different vantage points is the key to this album.”

Unfortunately, so tantalisingly close to the finish line, the album closer ‘Enough’ can’t handle the pressure and trips on its shoelace. By far the longest song, it seems to drag out to eight minutes rather than reach it organically, leaning heavily on a percussive machine gun to overcompensate for their weakest melody on the album. Still, at a taut 42 minutes you can hardly call Return self-indulgent; it’s just a shame that its final act runs low on the ideas that are so plentiful throughout the preceding journeys.

It would be easy to say that the DNA of Collarbones originates from the dance floor, but that would diminish the disparate influences they bask in on Return. Their ability to attack pop from nine different vantage points is the key to this album’s maturation, and it has a breadth in electronic experimentation that is uniquely warm and human. Lyrically it never overreaches past direct diary entries, but when they describe their language as “short-circuited … echoing emotion, duplicate devotion, binary in motion” on ‘Emoticon’, it’s clear that this is experience traversed by men born into the digital age.

Over the last two years, the duo have obviously honed their ability to deftly manipulate the mental state of their audience, and with Return they deserve to be seen as frontrunners in Australia’s blossoming group of electronic auteurs.

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‘Return’ is out now on vinyl and digital through Two Bright Lakes/Remote Control.