“Aviator lane ep” is the second ep for this project of Michael Radzevicius, a songwriter from Adelaide exploring the sunny melancholic side of slowcore that the Australian indie scene has developed these last years, from Art To Fighting to This is your captain speaking, from Purplene to Braving The Seabed.
On this new record, with the absence of Marty Brown (Art of Fighting), the drums disappeared and are replaced by beats not completely unlike those found on records by Arab Strap or Havergal, but in a less experimental way, with more smoothness. Everything else remains constant - his voice, the guitars, bass, keyboards – but this change makes the songwriting of Michael more modest and intimate, hopefully without leaving the beaches of a certain melancholic plenitude.
The climate is radiant with a feeling of serene lethargy. It isn’t a record you choose for its immediacy, it’s much more like a comfortable refuge, away from the disturbing events of the every day life. It’s probably the perfect record to take with you for long train ride or for walking alone under a gentle spring rain. Very soon it will surround you with a blissful atmosphere.
There is something from the Red House Painters circa “Ocean Beach” in the instrumentation and the sensitivity of the instrumental track that opens the record. “A New Code” is a delicate journey under the trees, among clumps of blossoming flowers, distilling their perfume into the air. And you feel nice. And you lie down on the green grass, just to see the clouds passing by into the azure sky.
The layers of synth on “Comfort is Shifting” give a more intimate, interior feel, like if the temperature was below zero outside. Filtered warm lights, a sofa, but you don’t feel that well, something too fragile inside, and something that could break in a minute or no. You are in communion with these waves of melancholy that never want to leave you alone, which always emerge during these times. But it’s not that bad, it’s yourself, a way to protect something true and absolute in your modest inner soul. Deeply beautiful. Each time you hear Michael repeating ‘you’re still destroying me’ – and it will happen, because this song will finish with the repeat function -, you’re one step below, and the guitar line could almost bring you to tears.
“Sinking from the Corners” opens with a pounding heart and then goes on with a soft folk melody which finally runs with almost joy through windy paths. There is a spirit of nostalgia here, about something ephemeral or elusive, though successfully captured for a time, in the space of the dream. Sometimes we want the reality to be far away.
“The Calm We Left” is darker and unsettling. Beats and keyboards are omnipresent and contribute to a kind of emotional suffocation but it gives also a very positive sentiment of urgency. The whole song sounds a lot like a possible lost Sepia Hours song, the similarity is really surprising.
And it is even truer on “Contact Controls”, the way Michael Radzevicius sings here and interacts with the beats in the first part of the song is very close to what Sébastien Biset (Sepia Hours) achieves at hist best. The second part of the song is very different and pays tribute vocally to a certain style of late eighties Australian indie music recalling me The Church, The Triffids or the Robert Forster side of The Go-Betweens.
“We Found the Colony, Now We Have Peace” finishes the ep on a note of contentment. This is like the late lights before dusk at the end of a long summer day, full of chance encounters and moments of awe, opening up the way for glowing hopes.
Michael Radzevicius confirms here the beauty we already found on his first ep. One more gem to add to the list of precious intimate slowcore Australian records.
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raw translation
: recommandé par dérives