Some debut releases are ground-breaking, intriguing and innovative; some aren’t.
This one is much more of the latter. Sure, this solo synth artist may be just starting out, but for a release to captivate the ever-needed initial audience, it needs to stand out from the crowd – something this EP will have a difficult time doing.
The record starts off with “Holy Unholy”, a mellow dance mix of synthesizer presets and effects you’ve heard all too often. This familiarity of electronic sounds continues throughout the album – with the vocoder effect in “Communion” or the looped synth bassline in “(I Love the Way They) Hang on You”.
These songs are undoubtedly easy to enjoy the first few times around, but there really isn’t much more to them than that, and that’s where this release really falls. Each song shares very similar musical properties where nothing truly sticks out, with the exception of the unique cheery sound of “…Hang on You”.
The composition of the songs overall, as well as the vocals throughout the pieces, are notably good, so this release isn’t entirely unsatisfactory.
The overall minimalistic style of the release makes it hard to decipher what keyboardist Matty Vehl is trying to achieve. Communion isn’t energetic enough to be any branch of dance or electronic rock, nor ambient enough to fall into any James Blake style ambient electronica.
It’s still early days and it’s hard to see whether or not this stripped-down take on synth rock will enter the river of Australian mainstream, but it may have a hard time getting there.
– Tom Gaffney
