Ocean Alley
The synth-heavy space rock of the ‘70s has never really fallen out of favor in Australia, where soundtrack songs like “Living in the Land of Oz,” from the vintage cinematic tripfest Oz: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Road Movie, are now considered national anthems. After all, this is a country where a tribute band only needs to bookend the name “Pink Floyd” with the words “Australian” and “Show” in order to sell out concert halls across the continent, so it should come as no surprise that Ocean Alley is quickly emerging as the country’s most Floydian original export since Billy Thorpe dropped his 1979 sci-fi rock opera Children of the Sun.
The band has spent most of the past two years touring behind their 2016 debut, Lost Tropics, highlighted by a single for “The Comedown” that evokes the best syrupy keys and rolling basslines of early Supertramp and even Styx (pre-Dennis DeYoung), with a touch of island reggae thrown in for contemporary measure. The languid, almost slow-motion video for that track presents an interesting dichotomy wherein the protagonist seems to be depressed and drinking heavily, moving from a dingy sickroom cluttered with empty bottles through a stoner concert where the band plays for a blissfully grooving audience, all completely oblivious to the sad soul wandering in and out of their party.
The band’s lyrics, likewise, tend to be dark, but couched in enough Xanax-dosed psychedelia to be almost unnoticed unless sought, matched in their other videos to the same sort of long wandering takes and speeding up and slowing down of the imagery that emulates either getting or losing a good high. There’s not a lot of live footage out there to go by, so it’s anybody’s guess how their aloof and somewhat ironic approach to island psychedelia will play on stage when they hit the Soda Bar on May 23, as part of their first U.S. tour.