Born to be Mild
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Peachy keen. Totally Mild are Melbourne’s art-pop band with debut album Down Time on Bedroom Suck Records.
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All this “dolewave” music is well and good but it’s time we took a walk on the mild side.
Totally Mild are here and they want to massage your ears with rich production and fill you up with soaring, seemingly happy, secretly sardonic choruses. Sounds good? Totally.
The Melbourne quartet’s debut album Down Time earned itself a glowing four star review this week from some bozo and lead singer and brains trust of the band Elizabeth Mitchell wants to elucidate the record’s title.
“Down Time’s meaning is three fold, actually it’s four fold. One is chilling out, relaxing, the second is when you’re sad and you’re having a DOWN time. Third, it’s silly (laughs nervously) but if time was a dog you’d say to the dog ‘DOWN TIME!’ Because time is moving too fast,” she says, fetching us all a universal truth.
“The fourth one is the sexy imagery on the cover — all my friends think it’s this one — ‘Getting dowwwwn time’ or having a ‘romantic’ time. We worked on it with Darren Sylvester, I wanted it to be glamorous and feminine, we made a cassette a few years and it was hand drawn, I didn’t want it to be lo-fi I wanted it to be clean like the production on the album, feminine and sexual,” she says.
“It’s my girlfriend on the front cover, Xanthe Dobbie, and it’s a shift away from a male gaze, if you flip the album it’s actually my hand resting on her.”
Mitchell has spoken of the stagnancy she felt while making the record while everybody was feverishly bugling about their escapades on social media.
“It’s not like I feel like nothing has happened, things are moving forward, that’s just a feeling I have in myself, I’m never doing enough, it’s a part of being in a time where everybody is like ‘Let’s be busy all the time and LIVE EVERY DAY AS YOUR LAST!’ I’m like – ahhhhh – am I doing it?” she asks, faux dramatically.
It’s important to have some “you-time”…some down time. The dolewave sound can come off as sluggish and, well, stagnant. Joe Alexander from Bedroom Suck Records fired the first shot over the bows in Totally Mild’s press release to accompany Down Time:
“It’s a new year and time for a new sound. Forget everything you heard about the Melbourne ‘dolewave’, what a crock of shit. We have found something much more important for you to listen to,” then started proselytising Totally Mild. I love it when people rattle the cage.
Mitchell feels “excited about the anti-dolewave stuff, it’s not the kind of music I wanna make, I don’t mind if we look like we’re being ambitious, it’s because we care,” she asserts.
Still, she had moments of being fed up with certain songs, even LP highlight Next Day.
“It’s my favourite song on the record. It’s nice to be able to listen to it again I was like ‘I HATE YOU (laughs) You mean nothing to me because I’ve heard that snare part isolated for three hours today,’ Now it’s back to being my number one.”
Let’s hope Next Day earns its very own video like young Christa.
After the band went through “a big tropicalia phase,” Mitchell owns up to loving “big female power ballads, I like Adele, that’s kinda dorky, I love Yoko Ono’s solo stuff and Stevie Wonder was my favourite thing growing up.”
Down Time is the album to keep you warm on the rug this winter, Totally Mild make songs in the key of life.
See them launch it with Geoffrey O’Connor, Milk Teddy, Caroline No and Habits.
Totally Mild’s Down Time album cover (Bedroom Suck). Sorry to snip your foot off Xanthe, our pic upload system is, um, improving soon.
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ALBUM REVIEW
DOWN TIME
TOTALLY MILD
(Bedroom Suck)
4 stars.
2015 is Twin Peaks’ silver jubilee. It’s uncanny how the icky seduction and owl-blink intrigue of Lynch’s TV series permeates so much new music. Melbourne band Totally Mild’s slow-sex, weird pop debut does it better than most. It smacks bottoms like Pikelet in Red Pleather and deals with mental illness, expectation and blurred lines. When I’m Tired jumps around on sparkly Buddy Holly guitars as Elizabeth Mitchell recounts night terrors “I went to find you’re setting my house on fire.” Go Home is a hiccup shuffle down alleyways, Move On leaves a light on for Belinda Carlisle and then Nights and Next Day leave me wordless. Gah. This is a really important record. Could give The Australian Music Prize a shake.
Sounds like: Anna Calvi checkin’ into ‘Motels bag-less
In a word: saxual
Curtin Bandroom, 29 Lygon St, Carlton. Fri, 8pm. $ 10. johncurtinhotel.com
Rowland S. Howard 1977, Picture by Peter Milne.
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HOWARD’S END
Rowland S. Howard’s death came far too soon, I recall seeing him cough up blood at his last show at the Prince of Wales, the writing was on the wall read: claret was on the hand.
In more life-affirming news, the ever astute Bek Duke tweeted a picture of where the Office Of Geographic Names have officially dubbed Rowland S Howard lane.
“The lane runs between Jackson St and Eildon Rd in St Kilda, close to where Rowland used to live.” If you’ve never seen the 2011 rockumentary Autoluminescent then do yourself a favour.
facebook.com/AUTOLUMINESCENT.RowlandSHoward
I want to get high, soooo high. REMI & Sensible J. Melbourne hip hop artist and his producer. Triple J Unearthed Artist of the Year winner 2014.
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REMI NEWS #428
REMi’s had a biiiig week. Par for the course for the sharp rap cat. First he jumped on stage with Delta Riggs at Groovin’ The Moo and nailed a few verses on a rework of their track Hey Victor, the song the ‘Riggs released exclusively on World Record Store Day as part of Dipz From The Zong. The ‘Riggs confirmed on their Instagram the track will drop soon.
Then on Tuesday he dropped Weirdos (From Planet HOB), the first cut from his new mixtape Call It What You Want (F.Y.G ACT: 2).
The blurred and blunted jam samples Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.
On Wednesday REMi beat Obama in a game of streetball, sorted things out between North and South Korea then hit the temples with the Dalai Lama.
Weirdos (From Planet HOB) – REMi
See him launch that sucka:
Northcote Social Club, 301 High St. June 12. $ 20. northcotesocialclub.com
Follow Dalai Karma here: twitter.com/joeylightbulb
