New Music - Collarbones, ‘Only Water’

Sydney’s Marcus Whale and Adelaide’s Travis Cook are the wonderful Collarbones, a producer duo who’ve been making genre-defying, forward-thinking music together for nearly eight years now.

I never heard their first album but their second album, 2011's Die Young, featuring HTML Flowers and Guerre, is a firm favourite of mine - a gem of a broken R & B / experimental club / house thing, thematically built around heartbreak and teen nostalgia, and structurally built on glitchy, post dubstep beats. It sits somewhere between James Blake, Burial and The Weekend, at times moving torwards the more big-room weirdo-house of Teengirl Fantasy, and full of the kind of jams that are nice to listen to when you come home at 3am. Seeing Collarbones perform live at Outside In Festival in Sydney a couple of years back, and then again last year at The Bird in Perth, have both been totally memorable experiences - the boys begin by wooing the crowd with more ambient, shimmering stuff before moving into a fully-blown rave dance party; maintaing epic energy and precision throughout. 

My Die Young heroes have emerged with a new track, Only Water, off a forthcoming third full-length, Return. It’s a real slow burner of a thing, featuring the soulful vocals of Oscar Key Sung, who competes for status of 'smoothest operator' croon-off with Marcus Whale regarding the spiritual powers of H20: Oscar: Only water, only flesh, only ideas are holding us together, keeping us.' Marcus: 'I could make it true enough for you, if I wash it deep enough for you'.

The track’s a bit more maxed out and anthemic then some of their earlier stuff – according to a statement Whale released with the track, Open Water was “built from a keyboard line recorded live, then fleshed out with all of the bells and whistles we could muster.” The collaboration with Oscar Key Sung was an organic one based on Collarbones pre-existing friendship with the musician, whom they hold in high regard: “We've collaborated on everything from improvised drone to, now, this hyper colour pop track, and all along the way I've felt inspired Oscar’s mind-blowing innovations in every musical avenue.” They're a duo of many contrasts, Return should be an interesting listen.

Return is out November 28^th on Two Bright Lakes. 

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