A song is three to five minutes long. Less is a sketch, more is an epic. This was decided by the storage capacity of early records and commercially reified for decades after the practical limitations fell away. Now imagine a world just like ours, but where everything is half its size. The average song would be a couple of minutes, and four would seem like an extravagant jam. On Sweet Thief, Luluc seems to beam their dream-folk transmissions to us from this speculative demi-world, each song compressed yet complete, rescaling our perspective to a bright point.
On their sixth album, Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett are well-established minimalists, but seldom have they been this penetratingly succinct. These are ships in bottles, delicate and fully detailed. Some of the best songs are less than two minutes, coming and going with eerie focus, leaving lingering afterimages. Opener “Honeyeater” is transfixing if you can hang with a bit of archaic inversion and Ren Faire imagery. Hassett’s tenacious acoustic guitar figure is stark and dusky like early Leonard Cohen, oozing low strings and a big oily bass. It’s characteristic of an album that unfolds spindly tunes into deeper geometries (also hear the rotund bassline bouncing on the morning-misty bagatelle “Which Way Now”).
Luluc is part of a twee rainbow that touches down in many places: England in the ’60s—not for nothing did they gain early attention by covering Nick Drake—California in the ’70s, and Glasgow around Y2K. It’s common to compare Randell’s singing to Nico’s deadpan murmur, but I hear more of Karen Carpenter’s dreamy virtuosity, the wafting Georgia side of Yo La Tengo, and the countrypolitan cuddliness of Camera Obscura. These references really just mean there’s a female singer whose calm, gorgeous harmonies flow together and apart as the attentively arranged music moves with them like a skating partner.
Sweet Thief was created partly before and partly after Luluc left Brooklyn to return to their hometown, Melbourne, for a year. In the middle, their friend J Mascis added percussion here and there, channeling the ramshackle precision of Dirty Three’s Jim White. Their newfound brevity might be a matter of necessity during a busy time, or an act of confident self-editing, or even a statement about modern attention spans. No matter—it’s effective. Each song explores a distinct arrangement style for Randell’s carefully wrought verses. The somnolent doo-wop of “Rewarding Melody” would fit perfectly on Camera Obscura’s Underachievers Please Try Harder. “Dopamine Slot Machine” is a soul ballad abstracted into quiet slabs of organ with liquid computery trills running down them. The palm-muted funk that just barely pokes through the trail-worn strumming of “Lullaby” highlights a knack for working vivid contrasts into little cracks.
The lyrics do occasionally take on the didactic quality that some critics—fine, let’s not be coy—have dinged. But the stuff about preachers and pharmaceutical prophets on “Wanna Get Free,” a roomy four-minute Stax-style slow-cooker, is as po-faced as it gets. It can’t be meant to be taken too seriously next to gushers like “You were made to smile and shake that thing.” I can swallow a lot of sunshine in the context of twee, and there is something not uncompelling about Luluc’s power clash of the overdone and the understated. In their same spirit of arch earnestness, I’ll offer that their music is better the less of it there is. In this crazy old content-drowned world, I respect artists who respect my time, and Sweet Thief packs a satisfying breadth of experience and emotional heft in a time-dilating 26 minutes.
