Royalchord: "The Good Times"

Where better to spend the summer than on the Flickr-framed shores of Australia? White whitewater, beer in the dunes, and ex-pats confused by what thongs means. It’s a place where the world likes to go to unwind, blow a didge and fly home from slightly pinker. It’s also a place Royalchord know gets cold in the summer, and they take no shame in mirroring this slight chill in their music. Your average Crowded House nut might think nothing of deporting two outspoken alt-folk fillies to some badland, like New Zealand or somewhere like that, as they don’t like to trot the party line: describing themselves as “dance music for the down and out,” Eliza Hiscox and Tammy Haider’s Royalchord are about as far removed from Cut Copy as you go without leaping from Edit to View (they’re allowed to claim ownership of the Royalchord brand, by the way—they whittled it down from eight members).

But surely, this isn’t actually dance music for the down and out: it’s unabashed Jagged Little Pill (1995) for the Xanax crowd. “I’m just sitting here waiting for the change to come,” bleats Eliza at the opening, “But oh / I think I may have got it wrong”? Appearances can trip you up you see, and while this taster from their upcoming Good Fight LP might begin like most other singer-songwriter shit, look beneath and you’ll find some robot bass fashioning a machine intelligence. Fair play, the spontaneous kazoo soon puts paid to that, but Haider and Hiscox are still going an inch or two deeper than most other laments banked for bad rom-coms. It provides a very neat four minutes of snatched contemplation for you to enjoy in case you get left by your mates on the beach…bugger…now the sky’s turning white…