On the band’s third full-length album, Cut Copy at times employs a greater production palette and a diversity of songwriting techniques to a truly fantastic effect.
Unfortunately, the wielding of this more expansive, experimental sound too often comes at the cost of some of Cut Copy’s trademark instrumental and lyrical focus, making Zonoscope a generally enjoyable but overly muddled record. Cut Copy’s strength has always lied in their simplicity. Its 2008 sophomore record In Ghost Colours proved to be a massive success for its hook-centered, no-nonsense combination of pop, electronic and guitar rock.
Such positive critical and commercial reception was both impressive and surprising, considering Cut Copy is a band whose instrumentalists generally don’t do anything that impressive with their instruments, whose drummer only plays simple mid-tempo dance-rock beats, and whose lead singer is neither a great vocalist nor a thought-provoking lyricist.
Their strength and appeal is firmly laid in the band’s simplicity and focus. It is regrettable, then, that on its much-anticipated third album, Cut Copy has, in the hopes of expanding its sonic palette, unsuccessfully abandoned much of this simplicity.
This is best illustrated by the third track “Where I’m Going,” which was originally released last year in the form of a concise, addicting single, but has, on the album, been practically ruined by excessive production and overdubbing.
Songs with potential to build and release tension, such as “Pharaohs and Pyramids,” often fail to reach any truly memorable climax or employ any sort of sonic dynamism, which were once staples of any, and every, great Cut Copy song.
The excessive nature of this album is probably most noticeable, however, in “Sun God,” the album’s closer, which is a 15-minute long, meandering piece of monotonous electro-jam music that ends the album not with a bang, but with a sigh. It’s a track highly reminiscent of Franz Ferdinand’s eight-minute electronic butchering of “Lucid Dreams” on Franz Ferdinand’s most recent album. One might imagine it could be fun in concert, but it’s an experiment that truly fails within the context of an album.
Zonoscope is not all bad, though. Opener “Need You Now,” undoubtedly the album’s best song, actually does combine expansiveness and simplicity, with wonderfully dramatic results.
“Blink and You’ll Miss a Revolution,” despite having some nearly laughable vocals in the verses, works fantastically as a sonically-diverse (one word: marimba) but concise dance song.
And “Hanging on to Every Heartbeat” is a romantic, catchy track that makes you remember why you fell in love with Cut Copy in the first place. Despite what is wrong with Zonoscope, when the songs are good, they’re still really good.
However, you’ll see that, on this record, the lows are really low. What’s most unfortunate, interestingly enough, is that one gets the sense that many of the lesser tracks on this album – save for “Corner of the Sky,” which is just terrible through-and-through – had, at some point, the potential to be great.
An example of this can be found in “Alisa,” which has some clever synth work and a great chorus, becomes one of the most irritating songs in recent memory with some excessive, discordant guitar meandering in its bridges.
It’s a song that implies that Cut Copy still had the ability, or potential, to make fun, catchy songs, but had become a bit too ambitious for their own good. As a result, on Zonoscope, Cut Copy’s heart is in just a few too many places to ever consistently be in the right place.
