Just as I did last year (with Blank Realm’s loveably shambolic Grassed In), I begin 2015 with a cracking album out of Brisbane.
Aussie shoegazers (Croc-gazers?) Nite Fields spent four years recording Depersonalisation in various locations, yet it’s a wonderfully consistent debut that hints of great things to come.
You can broadly divide the songs on Depersonalisation into two types: the slow ones, a dirgey (that’s a compliment by the way) blend of Faith-era Cure, A Place to Bury Strangers’ quieter moments and the electro-shoegaze of Radio Dept – the epic ‘Come Down’, with its uber-stoned vocal and shards of industrial guitar, being a perfect example; and the poppy ones, jangly guitars weaving in & out of Peter Hook-inspired basslines – ‘You I Never Knew’ sounds like a great lost tune by fellow Aussies The Church.
The band’s Brisbane roots are most clearly in evidence on the brilliant ‘Like a Drone’, a bewitching acoustic strum with a melody reminiscent of The Go-Betweens’ ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?’, singer Danny Venzin doing his best Robert Forster drawl, and the band showing they can do light as well as shade. More please.
[Rating:3.5]
