Friday 29th July 2011

MOZART PARTIES – “BLACK CLOUD”

Perhaps it’s a subconscious concession to the aesthetics of SoundCloud, but there’s a wave of British guitar music emerging that appears as if suffused with an orange glow. The colour of the platform through which this music is often presented may shade my perception of it, but the synesthesia of bands like Theme Park, Outfit, Pet, CYMBALS and below, Mozart Parties seems clear on the hearing of their music back-to-back, a soundtrack to a fading day.

On the surface, these bands are all stabbing synth-driven euphoria, gregarious and ebullient, fervent and florid because of it. But underneath, there’s a moodiness that’s been the preserve of the young and educated and slightly hedonistic since New Order first made sadness danceable. More pastoral than urban, there’s an outsider charm at play that carries a debt to Wild Beasts’ singular furrow, stretched through obsessions with synth Britannia and twenty-something time-to-make-real-life-decisions disorientation. The weight of the world that’s sometimes as light as a feather. It’s an intriguing contrast.

With “Black Cloud”, Mozart Parties are coloured a dying sunset of regret, happy with the skin they’re in but morose at something other lingering within. You wanna cry, but you don’t know why. It’s probably growing pains at growing old. Like their peers, they’re holding on to the thought of being almost-young forever.

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Mozart Parties – “Black Cloud”

(Photo: Daniel Regner)