As far as debut singles went in 2013, Flyying Colours’ was close to ideal. Infectious in the play it again and again kind of way, ‘Wavygravy’ suggested the Melbourne quartet were a rare treat: sans growing pains or that adolescent awkwardness you get when your limbs feel too long for your body, they seemed fully formed right from the get-go.
The kaleidoscopic video (more lo-fi visual art collage than ordinary performance clip), the stripy t-shirts and floppy hair all fit together perfectly. And then there was their sound — airy, boy-girl vocals, pulsating bassline, tumbling drum fills, and, with guitars for days, an unashamed wall of sound. While later singles such as ‘Running Late’ were more jangly than gazey, it’s hard not to think Flyying Colours would have fit right at home in an March 1991 edition of the NME. “Move over Ride, watch out MBV!”, a typically over the top headline might have bellowed.
Listening to Mindfullness, in which the group continues its crusade against good spelling (yes, that’s two ‘L’s they’ve used), those hyperbolic, hypothetical music editors might have had a point. This debut offers 10 songs that are dynamic, at times ethereal, and often thrilling, including a few moments memorable enough to worm their way into your mind long after the first listen.
Take opening track and single ‘It’s Tomorrow Now’. More Swervedriver than Slowdive with its grunge-like guitar grind, it’s an aggressive whirl of a song that builds to a cacophonous crash of wah wah guitar and tumbling drums. If it weren’t for the fade out, you might almost hear an exhausted band falling in a heap at the end of the recording.
The shameless pop of ‘1987’ plays as a less morbid, more rapidfire take on Joy Division’s ‘Disorder’, while ‘Long Holiday’, with widescreen synth wails and jangly Byrds-like guitar lines, is so poised it seems to strut as it slides from verse to chorus.
At half-time things move to a slower, more beautiful place via the dreamy, otherworldly ‘Mellow’ and slow burning ‘ROYGBIV’. Save for the jammy ‘Sun, Hail and Rain’, the album remains content to stay there. This reprieve from the addictive rush of songs like ‘It’s Tomorrow Now’ and ‘1987’ is not unwarranted nor unwelcome, but the album is certainly at it’s most captivating when it’s moving at pace.
Like many shoegaze records, the lyrics here often feel more ornamental than pivotal; they hang in the background, and at times it’s as if they exist solely as something to attach to front-pair Brodie Brümmer and Gemma O’Connor’s saccharine vocal melodies. Their voices often work in tandem, melting together and serving as counterpoints to the chiming guitar lines that usually provide each song’s main hook. Brümmer takes production reins with the band’s manager, musician Marty Brown, and whether that decision was financial, logistical or artistic, it pays dividends.
For their efforts, Mindfullness sounds sonically focused, honest, and plays as a satisfying culmination of a journey that began for listeners with 2013’s ‘Wavygravy’, and for the band, well before that. It also leaves plenty of room for exploration when the time comes for album number two.
Brümmer has said that the jokey album title is meant to reflect his pre-occupied state of mind during the making of Mindfullness (his mind was full of thoughts), and the catharsis that came upon completing it. With this in mind, so to speak, it’s no surprise that Mindfullness feels like the work of four human beings with a keen sense of self-awareness, at least in musical terms.
That’s to say these four know who they are and what they do — and they have no qualms about doing it, and doing it well. As any music fan who has venue hopped in one of the capital cities could tell you, anyone can slip a Fender Jaguar over a stripy tee, crank their amps to eleven while staring down at their glittering array of guitar pedals.
What’s more difficult is crafting the chaos that is inherent in shoegaze’s key elements — pulsating basslines, pounding drums, at times ear-splittingly loud guitars — into something palatable, let alone irresistible. In the end, it’s not ‘mindfullness’, but tunefulness that sets Flyying Colours sailing above the fray.
Our rating: 8 / 10
