2025 Repress
"I don't depend on memories, they're the things i want to deny". Well, good thing Efficient Space remembered that so much more of the world still needs to hear the music of Hydroplane and have dutifully bought a second (or is it a third?) pressing of the Melbourne trio's debut into print. I suspect most reading this will already be well aware, but it's nonetheless still of value to share some context. For all intents and purposes, Hydroplane were essentially the band The Cat's Miaow morphed into after the latter lost their drummer to London, and there's certainly a great number of sonic similarities between the two outfits that suggests a continuum rather than break - you can't hide from Kerrie Bolton's astonishingly evocative voice, which is more ghostly than ever here. The minimal arrangements of those early indiepop-styled TCM songs are mostly abandoned, the blueprint for the Hydroplane sound much more in-keeping with The Long Goodbye EP released on Darla right at the end of that first band initial incarnation. Which is to say, a meeting of slo-core referencing delicate/fragile songwriting akin to something like Galaxie 500 or Secret Name-era Low, and the dreamier/more ethereal aspects of a label like Kranky (i'd view Bowery Electric as their most obvious peer in that regard). It's a beautifully threaded-together album, classically structured indiepop miniatures bound with soft-toned tape loops and samples, in its way creating a unique refiguring of shoegaze aesthetics that retained the characteristic introversion of the genre but used subtlety instead of noise to communicate its message. It's an approach you might see apparent in the work of a band like, say, The Clientele, though in truth Hydroplane's debut feels like a fairly unique statement, a group of people making music unafraid to be quiet, fragile and bravely open-hearted. A lost classic from the forgotten end of the late 90s. Not anymore. And perhaps especially so given they're now playing together again...
FFO: Bowery Electric, The Clientele, Rocketship, Insides, April Magazine
