Best Music of 2008-Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours
I was fortunate enough to go earlier this year, maybe it was May, with my son to see three groups I'd never heard much of. The Ponytails, then The Black Kids, and the night ended with Cut Copy. This was at Sonar in Bmore and it was in their smaller stage. So maybe there were 50 of us. Unlike their album, live Cut Copy is like good jazz, open and exciting. Don't get me wrong-I love the album now but the live setting made me realize how good this music was. Unlike many, this is more than dance music-this is music to move into the future with-positive and yes, anthem-like, but not puerile or boring-but perhaps it was all of the live connection. CD or live, this is music to be with. Here's a review from cokemachineglow:
Infectious as any release this year, In Ghost Colours succeeds, not due to its originality, you’ve heard this before, but because of its timing and measured approach. This isn’t a hookfest, all soaring guitars and trying-to-be-anthemic posturing, nor is it repetitive, the same pattern playing out for seven minutes at a time. The Aussie outfit tempers one extreme with the other, reverberating guitars balancing out warm synths and, yes, a handful of gigantic hooks, hung like gaudy neon signage highlighting several songs, most notably “So Haunted” which features a raucous, distorted guitar line morphing into a veritable synth orgy.
The music is engrossing and sexually frustrated throughout; Cut Copy clearly has a knack for juggling tempos, a delicate feat despite the insistent momentum of everything. Present on this album is what some would affectionately refer to as “jams,” like the aforementioned “So Haunted” or “Lights And Music,” which radiates a hollow righteousness via dynamic twiddles and a few well-placed, angular guitar riffs. However, the more vivacious numbers are counterweighted with a number of vaguely subdued affairs, namely “Strangers In The Wind,” possibly the album’s strongest track, which employs clothes-right-out-of-the-dryer warmth, wistful vocals, and a forlorn alt-country guitar line buried deep in the mix.
Superficiality rarely sounds this tremendous, most likely due to its inherent lack of likability, and vocalist Dan Whitford is to be commended for crooning rather than sneering, employing irony and not ego. [Close call between those two, eh? – Ed.] That said, the lyrical content is nothing to spend any amount of time with (I believe he rhymes “you” with “true” on at least three separate occasions) but that’s to be expected as this is, at its core, a dance record; it’s even structured like a DJ set, one track transitioning seamlessly into the next. Though this approach does have its drawbacks, as my colleague David Goldstein has pointed out, painting a few of the tracks into a corner, it’s also kinda beneficial in that it encourages the listener to digest the album as a whole. Ultimately that’s the best method for approaching this record, as listening to it for the duration minimizes its flaws and amplifies its amiable nature, and, as I take my critic pants off for a second, it doesn’t, y’know, kill the buzz on the dance floor.
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