Light Weight is Melbourne-based band The Ocean Party‘s fifth album in the last three years, and is their first professionally recorded effort to date. It’s then a testament to the band’s own production that this record doesn’t sound too dissimilar to what they’ve produced before. Not that you’d particularly expect any huge change in direction for the group, who have been consistent in their self-actualisation as a band across their recent releases, but Light Weight finds them sounding tighter than ever.
It’s pure conjecture to suggest that this added pressure of recording in a studio influenced the band’s writing on this album, but there does seem to be increased ruminating on insecurities throughout the record. Early album highlight Guess Work is a prime example, as Lachlan Denton…
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…confesses his desire for detachment from the responsibilities of globalisation with the aid of some brilliant Springsteen-referencing piano work from Jordan Thompson. While they may conjure the colour of The E-Street Band on this track, most of the album sounds as lean as the post-punk album cover suggests.
There’s a new sense of experimentation to their songwriting on the record, as the band’s perspectives seem to be broadening. Curtis Wakeling sings from the point of view of an insistent boss over Zac Denton’s Stephen Morris-style mechanical drumming on Greedy, while album opener, Black Blood, introduces some of the most surreal imagery we’ve heard on an Ocean Party album so far. The culmination of all these elements is a somewhat unfocused collection of songs from the group, but one that’s as endearingly earnest as always.