Richard In Your Mind 'My Volcano'

by DougWallen on Jul 01 2010, 06:00AM

Richard In Your Mind
My Volcano
(Rice Is Nice)

Whether or not you envision it as the volcano of this album’s title, Sydney visionaries Richard In Your Mind create a vibrant world for their songs to inhabit. This follow-up to the band’s 2007 debut The Future Prehistoric picks up where last year’s whirligig Summertime EP left off, with the matchless SPOD in the role of producer and RIYM throwing any rules out the window. And so My Volcano encompasses nearly 50 minutes of the following: sun-baked pop, galactic ragas, tropical twang, junkyard beats, and electronic psych. There’s constant reinvention and genre-splicing at every step, but there’s also incredibly sweet melodies, a firm songwriting voice, and a big jovial heart.

Following the splintered, Beatles-meets-Beta Band introduction of ‘Tiny Colossus Face’ and ‘Candelabra’, there’s a Beck-ish harmonica and strum to ‘Losing Our Minds’. Set up with especially surreal lyrics, ‘Birds’ details the freeing of various avian species and ‘I Will’ piles on breezy beach harmonies. There’s a lullaby Beatles feel to ‘Lightning Eyes’, intimate beats and blissful chants on ‘This Face’, and a lush rainbow of beats and samples on the instrumental ‘Mongrowlia’. Lest we lose sight of the actual songwriting here, there’s a beautiful ditty in ‘The Sun Broke Into Your Heart’. Richard Cartwright tucks touching lyrics into one of my favourite choruses so far this year: “The sun broke into your heart / And that was just the start of your adventure / And I can’t even begin to imagine / All of your destinations.” In the context of this album, which is all about chasing unreal adventures and destinations, it’s a sentiment that rings true.

From there, as if urged on by those lyrics, My Volcano gets even weirder and more dissolute. ‘Creation’ manages a slow tribal thump, while the creaky acoustic number ‘Edge Off Dreaming’ simply trails off. Then the seven-minute ‘Flower Of My Heart’ offers a sustained freak-out until the album closes with the brief instrumental ‘Jamaica’. If all of this sounds scattershot, it very much is. But the band – co-founded by multi-instrumentalists Cartwright and Conrad Richters before expanding into a five-piece – hangs onto coherence for the most part. There are actual songs, after all, beneath every blizzard of instrumentation and samples. It’s a shaggy, free-form album, but not at the expense of a soul.

Doug Wallen