Moments comes five years after we last heard from Cut Copy, Australia’s answer to the second electropop craze of the 2000s and 2010s, when trendy tertiary subgenres of electronic music emerged and then faded like cultural whack-a-mole. Variants of previous decades’ IDM, EDM, and synthpop emerged (and fell apart) just as fast fashion does. Electroclash, chillwave, vaporwave, grave wave, cloud trap, hypnagogic pop, sophistipop, future funk, witch house, and other musical branches bent and broke off from their blossoming source, left to wither away or evolve into something new. Cut Copy make a half-hearted attempt at such evolution with Moments, but can’t quite pull it off.
Moments feels like a less effective, generic version of the addictive earworms Cut Copy once prescribed to our ears with masterpieces like 2008’s In Ghost Colours and 2011’s Zonoscope. Producer Tim Goldsworthy is very talented; he may have been thrown out of DFA Records, but he kept much of their aesthetic (Brian Eno by way of dance-punk). Many elements of Moments are wonderfully produced, whether the sounds are soft and soothing (like much of its omnipresent synths) or crisp as an apple bite (like the well-placed guitar noodling). Unfortunately, the actual songwriting feels like a bargain-bin twist on Cut Copy’s style and Goldsworthy’s DFA bona fides.
“Solid” opens Moments with a track that’s anything but an immediate introduction to the record’s mediocrity. It has the same recipe as all the band’s early singles, but without any of their emotional drama or tuneful snap. Like many songs on the album, it’s simply not hummable, and lead singer Dan Whitford seems tired and indifferent. If this all sounds harsh, it’s only because there is so much potential in Moments. The second and third tracks are genuinely good, creating false hopes that the rest of the album sadly deflates.
Track two, “Belong to You”, is arguably the best pop song Cut Copy have written in a decade, and features Whitford’s best vocal performance on the record. Perhaps he felt the need to actually put in some emotional effort, given guest artist Kate Bollinger’s wonderfully ethereal vocal contribution to the song. A synthesized bass and a keyboard riff straight out of Prince‘s 1999 create an excellent foundation for the song, while echoing taiko-style drums and some uncharacteristically weird, distant moaning layers atop one another to form a lush sonic space.
A funky bassline and tight rhythms of “Still See Love” surround this third track’s clean and simple chorus, itself awash with ambient waves of synths and delightful xylophonic breakbeats. That chorus is a rare recollection of Cut Copy’s heyday and is one of the catchiest things on Moments, though it’s a low bar. The one-two punch of “Belong to You” and “Still See Love” features Cut Copy in their classic electropop register. The rest of the album finds them either straining and failing to reach the anthemic heights of their electropop roots or attempting to expand on the slick but somewhat stale ambience of Freeze, Melt.
On top of the uninspired and faint melodies, Whitford’s rather muted, affectless vocals and aimless lyrics make several of the songs entirely forgettable. There are memorable moments, but only because they’re unfortunately cringe-worthy, as with the embarrassing child chorus that explodes near the end of “When This Is Over”. That track and its follow-up, “Children of Fairlight”, are the absolute low points, ending side one in a way that makes the listener reluctant even to flip the record over.
The second side begins by again raising the listener’s hopes, with the titular track promising something almost like ambient prog. The first two tracks of Moments’ second side are each longer than seven minutes, and at first benefit from having that room to breathe and build. The problem is that they never really build into anything. The chill-out pop ambience is wonderfully produced, but there are builds and breaks that create tension, which is never relieved by a sumptuous drop. “Moments” and its follow-up, “Gravity”, weirdly fizzle out instead of capitalizing on their length and complexity.
“Gravity” features a synth melody that bears a suspicious resemblance to the melody from Chvrches‘ much better song, “Tether”, from their 2013 electropop album, The Bones of What You Believe. It also includes a pointless spoken-word sample that, like the previous chorus of children, feels wholly unnecessary and generally awkward. It’s yet another decision on Moments that doesn’t feel thoroughly thought through. While the low end is meticulously produced and the stereophonic effects are cool, “Gravity” falls flat and never really goes anywhere.
Cut Copy abandon their attempts at elaborate ambient prog after “Moments” and “Gravity”, returning to much more simplistic pop with “More Alive”. The four-on-the-floor rhythm and its swirls of synthesized squiggles sound great but are immediately forgettable. The album’s final track, “Find a Place Among the Stars”, is an interesting attempt at a synthpop ballad, and actually does muster up some emotion thanks to Whitford’s performance, some sentimental lyrics, and relaxing layers of sweet synths.
“Find a Place Among the Stars” has some cool production flourishes (a bit of twinkling piano here, soft strums of electric guitar there), but ends the album with a reminder of its many missed opportunities and odd choices. The song seemingly ends after four minutes, just before bass-heavy rumbling ruptures the silence and peaceful but captivating beats and guitar intermingle for a beautiful moment – and then it’s over, and silence returns. Those final 45 seconds could’ve transformed into something beautiful, but instead, the opportunity is abandoned.
It’s the last in a series of confounding decisions throughout Moments, an album that feels like a muffled echo from electropop’s peak in the 2010s. By the time that second silence comes, Cut Copy’s moment has long since passed.