Totally Mild
Her

They sing the melancholy of a single day, that comma that got skipped, the accent that would have given a completely different meaning. A twist of fate, a fly's futile turn, a missed thrust. They remind me how futile, as an adult, every adolescent rambling is. The serious pose of Anne's salty lips. What I'm not sure if I have.

Only after Australia is their welcoming homeland, like the most desired mirage from which you'd never want to escape. A welcoming liquid. Melbourne, Eastlink. And then there's the soprano of Elizabeth Mitchell you have to reckon with. So wonderful in the roundness of her very white skin and that clean thing that is her voice. As if the impressionist "great bathers," from now on, yes, also had a voice. More than a contingent invitation. Her singing works on the transparency of glass full of raindrops, with a disconsolate, electric grace. And you can't classify it, so elusive it is, whether it hits or soars.

Then there's the surf and perfectionist guitar of Zachary Schneider, who loves to multiply effects along the individual riffs, the deep bass of Lehmann B. Smith, discreet alcoholic, the condescending drums of Ashley Bundang. Velvet glimmers, elegant swallows' flights, flattery instead of speeches. The search for a language of their own but retrospective. Sophisticated indie pop and yet always light; minimal synth-pop elements in the background of a chaste art-rock, tinged with dream pop, with some neopsychedelic transcendence, but always willing to return to a concrete plane. Mazzy Star, Belle & Sebastian/ Camera Obscura and, moreover, their "totally mild" soluble trait.

Mitchell, the songwriter, probes both relationships and independence with earnest will. Her romanticism doesn't offer consolation at all; at best, it resembles an unexpected encounter at the expiring food store. While a broken radio returns, at times, in tune: "I'm nothing to live for / I'm nothing to die for". She sings, blaming no one but herself for her own flaws and weaknesses.

Schneider's arrangements and James Cecil's production (Architecture in Helsinki) are far-sighted; thus, the evocative lyricism of the fragile melodies moves, once the atmospheres are delineated, to almost wicked regularities, drawing indecipherable sighs by moonlight.

Immediately striking are "Today Tonight" (a kind of happy, moody, funky frenzy that stands on a strange coherence), "From One Another" (ethereal twists on a cadenced and chiming piece), "Working Like A Crow" (with subtle blues phrasing). "I've just realized / I've been underwater all along / Breathing the air inside of me" recites "Underwater" and lets the last traces of desire that pulls you outside yourself vanish. But, to breathe, we will have to resurface, seeing the color of that water less greenish and deep. "Down Together" is the epilogue laid like a shadow that is neither cooling nor reassuring: "In wasted time the future seems bright/ … / I give up/ I don't want to stay where others have gotten stuck".

Too sublime to be the description of a day of mere failures (read "of crap"), too little happy not to be muffled like a simply lost day. Postponing to a later time.