THE OCEAN PARTY - Light Weight

Even though it's daytime over there when it's night here, you can by now get a sense of what life in Melbourne is like: like its music, a skewed copy of the West, steeped in the looseness of a somewhat inhospitable but wealthy outpost, an unusual setting where traditional culture fails to take root, to invade a magical, ancestral substratum.

The Ocean Party is among the bands making the biggest impression on that scene, with its gangly jangle that slips away, with a touch of healthy madness, from the melodic traps of the genre, nodding first to the soft psychedelia of Real Estate and company on last year's "Soft Focus", now to a dry, wave-schooled rumble ("Dirty Money").

New atmospheres are also told through the abstract, activist-leaning cover art, which somewhat conveys the chillier sound of this "Light Weight", a more loose-limbed outline, yet one perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic of the band's compositions. "Light Weight" thus takes on, at times, an air of existential searching (the fresh-faced Springsteen of "Grow Up"), at others an anecdotal, urban spirit (the wave-style reading of "Phone Sex"), always remaining in an artistic no man's land on the songwriting front too, sketching out horn-driven power-pop ("Aircon") and brief, cartoonish fragments of the old Dunedin sound ("Greedy").

Just as it's easy to assert a certain superiority on an expressive and intellectual level over other contemporary bands, it's equally hard to connect with the songs on "Light Weight", often built on tongue-in-cheek songwriting ideas, a style The Ocean Party pursues with consistency but without, as a result, finding much empathy with the listener.

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01/11/2015