Brisbane band Vegas Sunset has just released This Is the Moment, the follow-up to their last release Good Stuff, an 80s influenced pop record that did its job of attracting media attention.
The new track maintains some of that same nostalgic effervescence, most particularly in the interplay between drums and a few of the keyboard and synth textures, but is boosted sonically by a series of well-placed guitar parts dirtying up proceedings and subsequently pushing the track into a more enticing, or should I say, forgiving territory.
The melodies are effective, the chorus utilising the pleasing notes without sacrificing too much of the temperature of the track, without distracting from the production’s attempt at rawness and mimetic urgency. Despite the simplistic nature of the chorus lyric—‘Calling out to the universe / this is the moment this is the moment’—which complements the chorus melody, the verse words are little more ambiguous and subsequently create a juxtaposition that for the most part is successful.
The vocal performance is persuasive and assured with some of the chorus lines, or rather words, veering strangely but not unwelcomingly into a kind of Beatlesque lilt, this apparent on ‘universe’ and to a lesser degree ‘moment’.
The rhythmic apparatus at play here is an integral ingredient of the mechanics, the drum feel a governing force upon which the melodic passages rely and ultimately upon which they succeed. One hears traces of the contemporary with the retro here, and a mutant reference situation might be something like a tête-à-têtebetween Bastille and Savage Garden while One Republic is somewhere outside peering at the window with anticipatory glee.
This Is the Moment is a solid release, with its lyrical conceit fattened by the opacity of the verse lyric and the transparently ersatz but effective grit of the aural embellishments.
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