22nd November 2010

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New Cut Copy single: "Take Me Over" →

             

Don’t need much hand-holding to get excited about Cut Copy news, believe me. Owning my second-favourite album of the decade guarantees VIP status. The Cutters’re 11 weeks away from releasing Zonoscope and the teasers keep rolling out.

In July “Where I’m Going” signalled a lusher, poppier sound from the Aussie combo, and today’s streaming release of the official first single from Zonoscope, “Take Me Over”, confirms the aesthetic direction. It’s clubby, remix-friendly and totally unthreatening - and not a little overreliant on fat-sounding synth pads, particularly through the chorus - but it’s got enough of a stylistic backbone to fend off charges of pimping out to the easy-listening knockoff vibe of, say, the last Goldfrapp album. The 1980s are alive and kicking everywhere you tune in these days, so for a listener like me with first-hand - if youthful - recollections of late-’80s synthpop, ”Take Me Over” is easy to digest.

Frankly, I’d like to see Cut Copy taking their evident gift for song arrangement a little further, but on the whole it seems as though the first order of business has been to pepper their new tracks with as much vocal as possible: both this song and the aforementioned “Where I’m Going” really lay on the block harmony backing vocals (think The Beatles’ “Here, There And Everywhere”), but some moving harmony parts would really up the creative ante. I’m B-plussing this sucker because it’s lacking the tingling spark that drove In Ghost Colour’s “Lights & Music”, “Far Away” and “Hearts On Fire”, although it’s so full of detail and melodic clarity it’s hard not to admire it.

Click here to stream from Modular’s website.

Again, Zonoscope is out the week of February 7, 2011.

Tagged: Music.Cut copy.

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This work by Leonard Lumbers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.