'A good song can take you to a place that I don’t think anything else on Planet Earth can.'
Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore deliver on that belief within the first 30 seconds of their debut album as Empire of the Sun.
There's a gently striding beat, elegant guitar line and Steele’s uniquely authoritative voice feels transportive.
Empire Of The Sun: Walking On A Dream (Special Edition) (CD, Album, P/Mixed + CD, Comp + Sli) Capitol Music, Capitol Music, Capitol Music, Capitol Music, Capitol Music: 3097622, 221, 03 2 3, 50999-23: Australia: 2009: Sell This Version. Check out Walking On A Dream (10th Anniversary Edition) by Empire Of The Sun on Amazon Music. Stream ad-free or purchase CD's and MP3s now on Amazon.com.
He's like a captain calling for last passengers as he sings, 'Standing on the shore, waiting for the ship to call, there’s something in the way I move that keeps them on their own'.
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You get the sense of having being beamed to the edge of a future landscape, the sky and the scenery pulsates with excitement and expectation.
The album's title track 'Walking on a Dream' takes us to our next location, a warmer place filled with peace, joy and acceptance in this surreal world.
'Half Mast' and 'We Are The People' hold onto love and continue our adventures sailing on an updraft, and 'Delta Bay's' glam stomping energy feels like a night out spinning wildly and gleefully out of control.
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From the outset there was purpose and intent in the design of the progression of the story and adventures throughout Walking on a Dream.
The album arrived in 2008, but really Littlemore and Steele had been plugging away at their collaboration for many years prior.
They first met in 2000 and knew straight away they had something special together, but were also distracted and focused on the releases of their other groups.
Littlemore’s Pnau had just released Sambanova and was working on the follow-up and Steele’s band The Sleepy Jackson was on a roll releasing successive EPs building their songwriting and sound as a band, on the way to making their classic, Lovers album.
Classic Album: The Sleepy Jackson - Lovers
Empire Of The Sun Walking On A Dream Album
They also couldn’t quite work out how to harness what they had together as Empire of the Sun. But from the opulence of the band name alone, you get the sense that there would be something of a grand scale.
The pair admitted they had some growing to do as individuals before they could lock in on each other as co-creators on Empire of the Sun.
'I think our first years, we sort of sorted through the whole …I guess we were both kinda young, it was not so much jealousy, but I think we were both fighting through those things you deal with as new artists,' Steele explained to Richard Kingsmill in 2008.
'We were both headstrong young people and passionate and that can get confused at times,' Littlemore added.
'I think what’s been great is that we’ve gone through crap in the industry and we’ve come through that and realised what we had done initially was make great music and we needed to pick that back up and re-ignite that flame.'
It helped that they had a unified mindset in their approach as Littlemore explained.
'Surrender and positivity are the two words we carried with us through the record …as soon as we would come in and try and make something, everything we would accept, and you just keep accepting things until you build a monolith.'
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The results are wondrous and indicative of a very special connection between the two musicians.
'I think chemistry is very rare especially in a songwriting,' Steele told triple j. 'There’s a lot of musicians but not a lot of us find the chemistry. Nick had something which I knew nothing about which is great production and also lyric writing, Nick's a great poet.'
Littlemore had plenty of praise for his partner.
'I mean Luke’s a genius, I think that’s quite well known, melodically and the just the way he operates, we’re quite similar, its very much just shoot from the hip…with Luke, he just hears melody unlike anyone else so if you had that opportunity to work with someone of his calibre, it’s hard to not do something great.'
When asked what they each get from this project that they hadn’t got with their respective bands, the answer was conclusive.
'The greatest record of our lives,' Littlemore said.
'It’s easily the strongest thing I’ve ever been a part of.
'It can stand up with the most minimal of elements. It doesn’t need stacks and stacks of production, you hear it on the radio and it’s just a single vocal of Luke’s because he doesn’t need to double track and harmonise. Yes, he can do that incredibly well, but his voice singly just coming out straight as God intended it is incredible.
'I don’t know if we’ll do a record as good as this cause it just feels so magical.'
The future. It once seemed like such an exciting possibility when foretold by the Human League and their synth-wielding peers. It was going to be a place where men weren't afraid to look like women, women weren't afraid to look like men and the emergence of brilliant, machine-made pop music would shatter the hegemony of the guitar.
How times have changed. Electro-pop's modern descendents have evolved into a deeply conservative lot. Instead of looking boldly ahead to uncharted terrain, many acts set their sights firmly on the past in the hopes of creating a surface approximation of sounds that first came of age during Thatcher's early years. What once electrified is now the cod-New Order of Cut Copy or the slew of electro-starlets reportedly set to dominate the charts with their karaoke renditions of Annie Lennox in her crew-cut prime.
On first impression then, the Sleepy Jackson's Luke Steele and Pnau's Nick Littlemore appear to channel a more daring, forward-thinking spirit than most with their Empire of the Sun project. The two Australians do it by pilfering a name from J.G. Ballard and slathering themselves in make-up before parading around in full sci-fi/fantasy regalia - as evident by their Never Ending Story by way of Krull album art. They also claim to be creating something 'otherworldly', while citing filmmaker Alexandro Jodorowosky's surreal masterpiece, The Holy Mountain, as a key influence on their aesthetic. It's all accomplished by fusing electronic-pop with a dose of psychedliea and melodies lifted from the masters of late 70s MOR. Add these selling points up and it's not surprising that many a media outlet has declared Empire of the Sun this year's answer to MGMT.
Yet for all the band's loud ambition and technicolor theatrics, their debut, Walking On A Dream, arrives with little more than a middling gasp. For a band so intent on labelling themselves the harbingers of a new populist sound, as they've done in numerous interviews during the run-up to the album's release, the ten tracks featured here are firmly lodged within an all too familiar framework.
Like many of their contemporaries, Empire of the Sun have simply raided the 80s pantry for their musical ingredients and assumed that the perfect recipe for brilliant pop music is a rejigging of past masters and a few rose-tinted reference points. What they unfortunately end up with then is the 'Purple Rain' rehash of album closer 'Without You', or the children's show P-funk of 'Delta Bay'.
It's only the singles, 'Standing on the Shore' and 'We are the People' that find Empire of the Sun nearing their goal of creating a new strain of sunshine pop for the masses. Yet even this partial victory equates to little more than adding a solid disco beat to melodies lifted from Mick Fleetwood and co.
Is Walking On A Dream the sound of things to come then? Clearly not. Empire Of The Sun's grand ambitions are certainly worth applauding, but unfortunately they amount to nothing more than a cold and pale facsimile of the superior conquests of others who have trod these lands before.