THE OCEAN PARTY - Soft Focus

The time seems to have come for The Ocean Party too, a Melbourne quintet that has mostly stayed under the radar until now, but which has come up with an album in which they've clearly invested a lot – and not just them, but also the noteworthy Jigsaw Records.

Already purveyors of jangle-pop in the Paisley Underground vein at a somewhat suspicious moment (they've been active since 2012, a year after the Real Estate troupe broke through), Ocean Party conjure up a slightly different setting, Gatsby-esque and New York-ish, as seen in the lovely cover art in a naif Edward Hopper style.

Fewer lo-fi affectations and more colour in the arrangements (trumpet, saxophone, piano) make "Soft Focus", for better or worse, less catchy than a "Days" or a "The Flower Lane" (the only exceptions perhaps being "Went Out" and "Head Down"), a musical narrative that's decidedly more fascinating and layered, moving between dry but elegant garage-pop ("Deluded"), dazed East River Pipe-style psych-pop ("Floodlights"), and the linear rhythms of pure 80s melancholy ("Charters Towers", the U2-isms of "Norman Street").

The result, despite its pop clothing and thoroughly accommodating sound, comes across as almost cerebral, a sort of suburban indoor tragicomedy. The monotone vocal performances, subtly depressed and resigned, only find release when the instruments open up (the strange listlessness of "Bed As A Grave", the Reed-ian noir of "Cut Throat"), and it's these that are the true source of fascination in "Soft Focus", unfortunately even more so than the songwriting. On that front Ocean Party still fall a little short, but there's still time to make up for it.

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14/11/2014