I'm Listening To (and so should you)

Disclaimer: Non-breaking news about good artists may seem like a sub-standard post. Oh, and please don't kill me for any faux pas about the band, Jake.

Cut Copy are a band I once mistook the name of for every other artist with "Cut" in their name; from "Cut Chemist" to "Cold Cuts" and "Carbon Copy", the latter of which's existence I'm not even certain about.

But indeed the new wave throwback boys from Oz are like none of the above, though I failed to find them that spectacular to begin with. I picked up a slightly corrupt copy of their Fabriclive set, at about the same time as I picked up the one before it, by some wonderful guys named Evil Nine. Sadly for Cut Copy their laidback and slightly poppy sound paled in comparison to the hard grunt of the E9 boys, and I kinda put CC on the backburner.

However, through some vicarious fanboy antics of His Whoreness , along with a general good vibe surrounding the release of their latest album In Ghost Colours, I decided to give them a decent thrash. They didn't disappoint.

Lead singer Dan Whitford doesn't have the unique and charismatic voice I tend to swoon over (see Maynard James Keenan, Patrick from Fall Out Boy or Julian from The Presets, to name a few), but he's bang on touch with their sound, like a less camp Ricky Gervais. Nice use of multiple vocalists and sunny guitars make for tracks that stick in my head all morning and find me singing like an idiot in the office. The album feels short, but it flows perfectly so its difficult to skip anywhere on it. Even parts that had me going "meh" soon became quintessential for the album as a whole.

Though they are nothing like Underworld, their unique but unabrasive sound and laidback but uplifting style makes me draw many parallels, which is big praise coming from me.
Last FM told me I listened to 71 tracks by them in a week - that's the album around 5 times. Again, a big deal considering I have 4,000 tracks on my Pod and I tend to just click "Shuffle Songs" as to be unbiased.

Standout tracks on the album for me include:
Feel The Love
Out There On The Ice
Lights and Music (that's the first three right there)
So Haunted
Hearts On Fire (less cheesy on the album than the pre-release, which works well)

Here's hoping they do a Japan tour - though it looks as though I'm going to have to hit Melbourne to check them live...