Tagged By Elizabeth Mitchell

INTRODUCING: Totally Mild

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The presser for Totally Mild’s debut record Down Time gets on the offensive straight away – saying to forget about dolewave (strong words considering they’re named after the Aussiest show ever after Burke’s Backyard) and get on board with this new sound. Well, you’ll pry broadly accented mates singing about ciggies and stained carpet from my cold dead hands, but I like this a hell of a lot too.

Totally Mild’s ‘new’ sound has some strong Geoffrey O’Connor vibes to me. It’s less aggressively produced and hedonistic, but there’s that same woozy darkness in his voice as there is in singer Elizabeth Mitchell’s – both breathy and gauzy but with real underlying pain. These are relaxed, slow-paced songs, but by keeping the majority under the three minute mark, the guitar tone sunny and the harmonies plentiful, the band have managed to keep the record from dragging. A highlight for me is ‘When I’m Tired’ – a catchy, cheerful track about night terrors and fire. Happy-sounding songs about bad shit get made all the time, but rarely with the subtlety and smarts that these guys show across this whole record.

So whether you’ve ACTUALLY been hunting an alternative to the current Melbourne jangle-centric scene, or you just wanna hear something cool, Totally Mild are worth your time.

Down Time is out today through Bedroom Suck on digital and vinyl.

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LISTEN: Zone Out – ‘This Place’

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‘This Place’ is the new single from Zone Out, Melbourne’s latest incarnation of the twee spirit, led by Ashley Bundang. Zone Out’s music is an affable blend of gentle strumming and fey vocals, replete with the lulling effect of xylophones, oohs and aahs, and woollen scarves and mittens. The band’s core line up of Bundang and Zahra Khamissa has been expanded to include ScotDrakula‘s Dove Bailey and Totally Mild‘s Elizabeth Mitchell. With the fuller sound that the new members provide and the song’s spacious, warm production, ‘This Place’ may be Zone Out’s loveliest release yet.

Bundang is part of the unfeasibly productive Osborne Street group, based in the suburb of Brunswick. She plays in Velcro, Pencil and Hot Palms, all of whom make some form of loose, meandering indie pop (I’m trying so hard not to use the word ‘jangly’). She’s also got a couple of solo ventures up her sleeve, under the working titles White Australians and Obviously. Written on casio and guitar, these songs are more insular than anything Zone Out has done – largely because Bundang buries the vocals beneath synth tones and effects that sound like a UFO landing rendered through computer speakers.

Zone Out is the most accessible of Bundang’s projects. A comparatively obscured version of ‘This Place’ appeared on Obviously’s Mondayitis EP. The promise of the song’s progression was already clear, but Bundang’s melodies fare much better under the warm, full-band treatment that Zone Out provides. It sounds as though she swallowed the complete Twee as Fuck compilation and assimilated it bodily, to churn out gorgeous, tea-cosied pop songs forever more. ‘This Place’ reminds me of the Shop Assistants, the Softies and Blueboy in particular, but Bundang pulls off this style so convincingly that the fact it’s been done before seems kind of irrelevant.

‘This Place’ is the teaser for Zone Out’s Something Less EP, which is due out on 23 August. The EP will also feature previous release ‘What’s Missing?’. It will be available digitally, as a limited run of 50 cassettes through Osborne Again and on CD through Why Don’t You Believe Me?
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