This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Album Reviews
Album Review: Cut Copy – Zonoscope (Modular)
By Marc Samuels | Published on Tuesday 8 February 2011
‘In Ghost Colours’, Cut Copy’s last long player, was one of the albums of the noughties, an unexpectedly heady collision between Balearic euphoria and indie-rock that marked it out as a more suntanned cousin of New Order’s ‘Technique’. This follow-up thus has a lot to live up to, and whilst it would be unfair to call it a crushing disappointment, it’s fair to say that it underwhelms.
Although ‘Zonoscope’ does suggest the Australian four piece have attempted to broaden their sound, the template is initially as expected – hands-in-the-air rave synths and dreamy rushes of psychedelia sitting side by side with more traditional band aesthetics.
Opener ‘Need You Now’ has lyrics straight out of Bernard Sumner’s ‘Will This Do?’ book of clichés, but it carries a decent pop tune. Elsewhere there is everything from rousing glam rock (‘Where I’m Going’) to slinky Detroit techno-pop (‘Pharoahs & Pyramids’), but the shoegazey echo-laden stadium indie of the last few tracks just lacks the deft melodicism that was shot through ‘In Ghost Colours’ so effectively.
That said, the best tracks (such as expansive fifteen minute closer ‘Sun God’, which veers between clattering DFA nu disco and spacey electronica) tantalisingly offer a glimpse of where they could have taken things.
In truth this is a decent album, with no lack of ideas, but it could have been so much more. MS
Physical release: 7 Feb
