Don’t get me unsuitable, Methods to Develop a Sunflower Below Water isn’t any remedy session, however together with her second album Sydney’s Alex The Astronaut has managed to efficiently distill this sense and inject it right into a collection of joyful, sky scraping indie-pop songs.
Alex Lynn additionally will get what T. S. Elliott meant when he agonised over whether or not or to not “disturb the universe”, the appreciation of the enormity of life’s small steps that may really feel so steeped in that means and fraught with hazard that they appear insurmountable. If Sunflower has a message it might properly be so simple as, ‘do it: now!’
Bringing the extremely private into your artwork is all properly and good, but when it’s so particularly ‘you’ then it could threat maintaining the listener at arms size. Lynn faces this head on, sure the small print are actual however they act to immediate the viewers to find equivalents in their very own lives. A troublesome trick to tug off, however she does it time and again.
Euphoric single, “Haircut” is the purest instance of her experience in motion. A lyric that deftly describes the social anxiousness hanging over what, to others, could appear to be incremental actions in the direction of recognising your true self wedded to a tune giddy with the enjoyment (and aid) of lastly feeling free to specific your sexuality. It’s highly effective stuff however no outlier on an album full of such moments.
From the phrase go, the plangent fiddle-driven golden Go-Betweens rush of “Rising Up’ sweeps all earlier than it. Rewind and be aware the Go-Betweens reference: it’s not dropped in an act of wishful considering as is so usually the case. Cynicism be damned, sure that is technically indie pop classicism but it surely feels so box-fresh and filled with real lived expertise and emotion that resistance can be churlish and in the end futile. Pushing the envelope is all properly and good however there ought to at all times be a spot the place capacity so joyfully utilized is valued simply as extremely. It is time to welcome Alex The Astronaut into your orbit.
