“Fire Fire Fire”
from the album Granddance
2007 (U.S.)
iTunes
MP3 – “Fire Fire Fire” [right-click/save-as]
It used to be that you could put your faith in, well, Faith. There was the notion that The Truth was everlasting, constant and handed down from the big dude himself. Then theologians started literally messing with the gospel: After figuring that dooming those unbaptized babies to an eternity of semi-existence was pretty cruel, Limbo was taken off the books. With mounting evidence for evolution, creationists changed their tune and came up with “intelligent design” as a less lunatic alternate to hard-core creationism. Let’s not even get into how much trouble those ideas of a flat Earth and geocentricism gave the world as science deflated old-world ideas.
It sort of makes you want to put your faith elsewhere, doesn’t it? Maybe Pop should be the rock upon which your day-to-day revolves. After all, science hasn’t been able to discredit Pet Sounds and, at least to the best of our knowledge, there hasn’t been any evidence suggesting that big, hooky arrangements aren’t what we thought they should be.
Australia’s Dappled Cities might be a good place to start your new worship. Granddance juggles bedroom-pop’s coy vocals with arena-pop’s knack for soaring melodies. It knows the nearly spiritual power of a jangly guitar, but isn’t afraid to spruce up its tunes with fleshed-out, lush arrangements. And if Granddance doesn’t exactly make a case to canonize Dappled Cities to join pop’s saints, it could be enough to make a believer out of darn near everyone.
Dappled Cities’ mix of bedroom pop’s understated melodies with bigger ambitions takes a lot from Trembling Blue Stars’ bag of tricks, though Granddance is a lot more than just another installment of indie-kid Bob Wratten-worship. For starters, “Fire Fire Fire” unwinds some shy, understated vocal melodies only to see them slowly blossom into nearly epic arrangements worthy of Snow Patrol. “Vision Bell” takes a whirring keyboard to add a dose of sci-fi weirdness to the band’s ear candy. “Colour Coding” and “Granddance” get a little more conventional, as the band simply applies its spin on bedroom grandiosity to the tracks for big, layered arrangements with all the comforts of home-brewed basement pop.
The best thing about Granddance isn’t the Aussies’ ear for high-fructose melodies or their urbane arrangement powers. It’s that knowing, no matter what science and mass culture throw at this record, it’s going to be as credible five, 10 or 20 years from now. Now only if religion was that reliable.