Review: Cut Copy – Free Your Mind
For most, summer is the embodiment of happiness. Whether it is reminiscing about festival lolz or your beach break with mates, we always seem happier, content and more alive during those long hot days. Now, despite the autumn chill settling in, Cut Copy have provided us with a trigger to all those memories of summery love.
Their new album, Free Your Mind, evokes a light and playful sentiment, mixing feelings of freedom with huge retro sounds. In fact, according to the band, they were heavily influenced by San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, and Britain’s Second Summer of Love in 1988.
The first single, ‘Free Your Mind’, is a wonderful slice of late 80s acid house. Rave pianos lifted right out of a Happy Mondays tune, with typical bongos driving the rhythm section. The sound has been modernised, but the swooping lyrics “Riches of the world are for you/You gotta fill the souls of your daughters and sons”, hark back to the late 60s.
‘We Are Explorers’ adds a psychedelic flavour. Swooshing, alien-like synths and a fantastic percussion breakdown wouldn’t be out of place in the Glade at Glastonbury Festival.
The album is broken up with small interludes that blend the tracks together, creating a cohesive journey as the theme of the music changes. ‘Footsteps’ brings us forward, with elements of 90s dance and a bassline reminiscent of Snap!’s ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’, melded with vocal elements from Spandau Ballet.
The musical expedition continues, as sonically, we go back to the 60s. The highly reverbed and layered vocals on ‘Dark Corners & Mountain Tops’ and a simple tambourine/guitar hybrid create a hazy scene. The song suddenly injects a saxophone solo atop a pulsing 70s bass.
Free Your Mind is a pastiche of its predecessors. Yet it isn’t sardonic or gimmicky. Rather, its lyrical contents reminisce about times where limitations were pushed and boundaries broken.
What Cut Copy have achieved doesn’t seem contrived, nor an act of trend following. Nods towards Primal Scream’s Screamadelica – on the magestical ‘Take Me Higher’ – and the Happy Mondays mixed with the philosophy of the 60s movement are an homage to a time in music and culture that deserves to be remembered and replicated.
Given this almost experimental theme, Free Your Mind manages to remain, at its heart, a solid pop record, one that is littered with great hooks, concise production and clever songwriting.
So bear with me while I go grab my fishing hat, smother myself in rave paint and dance around in a field. And, in the spirit of love, it would be wonderful if you could all join me!
– Alim Kheraj
