Graham Reid | | 1 min read
My Light
We were so impressed by the previous album Looking For Space by the Dunedin-founded and globally ambitious Mild Orange that we ran a track-by-track account written by their mainman Josh Mehrtens.
It confirmed they were as smart a band as we thought.
They arrive at this fourth album of gently assertive dream pop somewhere adjacent to the Church of the 1990s and Slowdive.
There can be a crystalline purity to Josh Reid's guitar work which creates lightlydelic shoegaze with an emphasis on melody and a widescreen production, as on the pastoral Rubicon and the glistening pop of My Light with its subtle influence from disco.
The band was originally the project of Reid and Mehrtens (who writes, sings, orchestrates and has been the four-piece's engineer and producer).
They neatly underplay their strengths in the discreet country influence on the shimmer'n'jangle of the romantically atmospheric Moonglade (“I've got a place in mind that can't be seen in any city . . . moonglade on the lake”) and Searching For which begins spare and up-close but steadily gets wind under its wings and lift-off in its cinematic second half: “I don't know what we'll find but I need you to help me fly”.
Recorded at studios in London, Wales, Perth and Taranaki, this is an album bathed in Mehrten's lyrics of natural imagery and hazy mysticism under an appropriate title.
When it's not ablaze, as it mostly isn't, The//Glow radiates a warm domesticity and soft brightness which they are taking to Britain and Europe in the coming months.
Lucky audiences.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here
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