Rice is Nice – June 26 2010

If you’re already familiar with Richard In Your Mind, you’ll know two things – there is no weirder band in Sydney, and there is no band that does psychedelic nostalgia quite as well. The beauty of their second album is that no two songs fall into an even remotely similar category – an endearingly scattered collection, it pulls influence from every corner of the creative spectrum.

Opening with the sparsely ethereal ‘Tiny Colossus Face’ featuring Richard Cartwright’s high-pitched speak/sing, the record segues into ‘Candelabra’, which showcases a very different aspect of the band, infused with hip-hop beats and slacker rapped vocals. The record’s most conventional moments are showcased on songs like ‘I Will’ and ‘The Sun Broke Into Your Heart’, the former channelling the criminally underrated Ladybug Transistor with surf-rock guitar pops and harmonies, and the latter relying on shyly enunciated vocals speaking of adventure, featuring a rather vanilla guitar-accompanied melody considering the band’s eclecticism, but one that works well nonetheless. The spirit of Richard In Your Mind is captured in tracks like ‘Mongrowlia’, a mostly instrumental cut that builds from a light harp to a soaring euphoria heavy with atmospheric noise, and ‘Birds’, on which a whole list of our fine feathered friends is rattled off in a vague and dreamy extended sigh.

Bursting with whimsical melodies, lyrics that relish in absurdity and instruments from near and far including sitar, raagini and ocarina, what we have here is an album as varied as its creators’ minds. This kind of music won’t appeal to everyone, but for those who can appreciate the sweet sound of genuine musical madness, it’s a mind-boggling trip certainly worth taking.