River Yarra is the third name change for Melbourne producer Raudie McLeod (previously Raudie McLeod, 1993), and ‘The Look’ is the first single he’s sending down the stream through Solitaire Records.
Sitting in at almost eight minutes, ‘The Look’ is an expansive house track that sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear while the sun rises after the second night of a three-day festival held in the red desert of the Australian outback.
It unwinds like a heatwave with floating, spliced-up Dusty Springfield vocals and an array of off-kilter field recordings – there’s rocks being thrown into water, echoes of people shouting, and even a fleeting didgeridoo breakdown – that bleed in and out of each other in slow-burning symbiosis. For those who witnessed Tornado Wallace’s magical set at Golden Plains this year, it might make you a little nostalgic.
Raudie himself sums it up as “psychic-cosmic-bush-dance”, which pretty much hits the nail right on the head.
I highly recommend that you tear off a bit of paper, jot down ‘River Yarra’ and store it somewhere safe that you can keep an eye on it.
