| Selected Songs 1997-2003 compiles some of the finest moments in the recording history of Hydroplane, the Melbourne-based indie-pop three-piece that operated alongside The Cats Miaow through the second half of the nineties. Its the third release in what feels, now, like a loosely planned series by World Of Echo, documenting the music made by this group of friends in Melbourne sharehouses or, in the case of The Shapiros, while traversing the International Pop Underground. Andrew Withycombe, Bart Cummings and Kerrie Bolton, all members of The Cats Miaow, were the Hydroplanes core. If The Cats Miaow was about the perfect, minimalist, two-minute pop song, Hydroplanes music was far more open-ended, embracing the loops and drones, sampled house-y shuffle beats, the burbling of a Roland Jupiter-4 synth, all of which the trio joined, effortlessly, to their endless capacity for moving, elegant melodicism. The hazy repetition of the gentler side of Krautrock is in here, somewhere, which also suggests Stereolab at their most intimate and disarmed; the gently drifting guitars, gauzy and oneiric. Songs like "The Love You Bring" set indistinct tonal floats across dance rhythms, in a way not quite heard since My Bloody Valentines "Instrumental" - but with the added gift of Boltons gorgeous voice. This loose coalition with dance music, and the quiet experimentalism, gestures towards peers like Hood, Acetate Zero and Other Peoples Children, and releases on renegade labels like Wurlitzer Jukebox and Enraptured. The Cats Miaow were reconciling independent pop musics past - sweet melody and melancholy, chiming and droning guitars - with the futures promised by DIY electronics and nascent digitalia, the interface of indie and IDM that led to some of the undergrounds most blissful, texturally swoonsome music. |
