Down Time

Melbourne's Totally Mild exhibit a considered playfulness on their first fully-realised LP, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Children, the times they are a-becoming quite different. Six billion years of evolution have lead to seven billion humans all scrambling for their own piece of the planet’s dwindling plenty; whole generations who were raised to chase their unique-snowflake dreams left to deal with the deflating realisation that they’re owed nothing, and unlikely to get it. And yet, old people as they have for time immemorial – still lament the mettle of kids-these-days; keep preaching the belief that the Western capitalist marketplace is a true meritocracy, and that, with but a bit of elbow grease and/or the right self-help incantation, ‘success’ is waiting to be had.

“They were young once, like we are / Don’t they know it’s hard?” laments Elizabeth Mitchell, voice ringing clear as a bell, midway through ‘Move On’. Its classic jangle and playful vocal shows no ambitions of being some self-appointed anthem-for-a-generation (or its modern-day equivalent: a soundtrack for a beer commercial). But Mitchell’s young-person’s ache is real, and relatable, and universal: a desire to be seen, to be heard, to be acknowledged; to live a life true to one’s self, in the face of an indifferent world.

Mitchell, the leader of Totally Mild, runs her blues through the prism of songwriting (“If you do it wrong / If you make a mistake / Start another song”), expressing desire to be heard literal. It’s about putting out those songs – each with the implicit hope that they’ll offer a connection to others, that the artist will be understood through their art – into a world oft-unfeeling. It's about fashioning two-minute bespoke artworks that’ll instantly be turned into compressed audio commodities; at best fodder for blogs, at worst lost in the teeming infinity of the uploaded masses.

That’s where Totally Mild began: 2013’s Castanet an ultra-lo-fi, Bandcamp-issued home-recording that found Mitchell building songs almost entirely around her voice. Helping her, in assorted moments, were Full Ugly’s Zachary Schneider and Kes off-sider/one-man-industry Lehmann B. Smith, in whose band Mitchell was playing. Along with drummer Ashley Bundang (in whose own project, Zone Out, Mitchell also plays), they’ve slowly turned Totally Mild from shaky recording project into rockband proper, growing tauter with every passing, charming show; Schneider’s sharp, trebly guitar lead now a distinctive part of the band’s sound.

"Scrappy, that favoured dolewave descriptive, gets no play here."

Down Time is, then, a second record that feels like a debut, a proper introduction to Mitchell’s sweet songwriting voice, both figurative and literal. Totally Mild may be another jangle-pop band from Melbourne, and Mitchell may be singing about daily art/commerce realities – “You’ve got to go to work in the day / Put on a show again,” she sings, in ‘Go Home’ – but I can’t imagine anyone calling them dolewave, no matter how often they’ve toured with The Ocean Party. There’s none of the wry Australiana, the hard proper nouns, the lyrical Kmart realism, the self-deprecation, the Hills Hoist artwork. Instead, Down Time’s cover is a hyper-glossy Darren Sylvester photograph, whose plethora of sexual signifiers could support its own essay (those down for added suggestiveness can also lend an ear to saxophone-drizzled, soft-rock-ballad closer ‘Money Or Fame’, in which the line “You said you’d never stop coming / Until I stopped calling your name” revels in its double-entendre).

And the production, by Super Melody’s James Cecil, is, if not quite glossy, sparkling in its clarity. Scrappy, that favoured dolewave descriptive, gets no play here. The pristine recording captures the bending of strings, the trailing of echo, the tiny, knotty details in the spangling, tangled play between Mitchell and Schneider’s guitars.

A song like ‘Nights’ is a work of controlled mood and unexpected elegance, Mitchell’s high, airy voice recounting on-the-tiles-in-a-couple social anxieties (“If you’re looking happy / I won’t speak to you / I never trust just what a smile will do”), as reedy, seedy saxophone wheeze joins in a slow, surging build; this the only song on the album to push on past three minutes. ‘Always Around’ manages to sound epic in two, changing shape as it swims with multi-tracked, reverb-bathed vocals and wonky synth haze.

Mitchell compresses ideas into tight spaces, and will often pull an unexpected reverse, be it compositional or tonal. ‘When I’m Tired’ (the only song to appear in a proto form on Castanet) is 110 sprightly seconds whose opening, sunshine-and-smiles gambit – “I had a good day today!” chirrups its opening line – turns almost instantly nightmarish, even as the tune remains unchanged; the bouncy bass and A-OK mood going from pure twee to darkly ironic in a blink. And lead single ‘Christa’ has a playful sense of disorientation, its Lynchian slow-dance seeming, at first, to swagger, only to start to stagger; the guitars sounding as if on the brink of unravelling, its lyrics making a motif from blood.

Down Time is filled with a host of songs that match bright hooks with thoughtful composition; full of odd moods and smirking sleights. It’s an indie-pop album both quietly heady and genuinely pretty; and, if we’re to take it as Totally Mild’s essential debut, it marks quite the arrival. True, there’s nothing else so crystallising, lyrically or melodically, as ‘Move On’; nothing that steps outside the personal (be it of subconscious or of relationship) to look at the songwriter’s place in the bigger picture. But it’s hard to hold that against Mitchell. One not-quite-anthem-for-a-generation is one more than most people’ll ever write.

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Down Time is out now on LP/digital and CD through Bedroom Suck.