Cut Copy never sounded like a band that had a problem getting to the point. Nor did they ever sound like a band that needed a serotonin boost. Yet, even “Lights & Music”, “Need You Now”, “Hearts on Fire”, “Take Me Over” and just about any of the Australian quartet’s uniformly excellent and directly-titled singles can sound wishy-washy and kinda dark in the face of Free Your Mind, its Successories screen-saver album cover and Dan Whitford’s claim that the title refers to a freedom that’s “universally positive and timeless.” Maybe Cut Copy were hippies all along, and whether you think that’s progress or a serious regression, Free Your Mind is at least a sensible continuation of their trajectory from the cosmopolitan, club-friendly and DFA-affiliated In Ghost Colours to the breezier, more festival-ready 80s pop of Zonoscope. But there’s a difference between freeing your mind, losing your mind and just flat-out shutting it down. And you just wish Cut Copy left even something to the imagination, as their most overtly fun and least dynamic music restates the obvious over and over again throughout Free Your Mind.
Their aims are admirable here. Whitford claimed the band took their inspiration from the Summers of Love, both 1967 and 1989. Philosophically and sonically, those years are something of a package deal anyway—Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets were essentially psychedelic pop-rock bands with beats, while Primal Scream and Happy Mondays had no qualms about straight-up pilfering the era. You can’t doubt Cut Copy’s commitment to sidling up with nu-Madchester types like Jagwar Ma and Paradise, as there’s barely any modernist touch to be found on the title track, just all of your favorite E’s and wizz signifiers, sorted out neatly: staggered house piano vamps, endlessly thumping bass drum and Whitford letting his vocals get all baggy in every sense of the word, an amalgamation of Shaun Ryder’s dysfunctional relationship with pitch, Ian Brown’s bedheaded proclamations and Bobby Gillespie’s revolutionary hokum.
In about five minutes, you hear everything new Cut Copy has to offer, though they stay true to their strange nostalgia for the future by slipping inside the proverbial acid house on “Let Me Show You Love” and all but sampling Stone Roses’ “Don’t Stop” on “Take Me Higher". There are enough highlights to still make their ecstatic live shows a must-see; “Walking in the Sky” is stately flower-child pop while “We Are Explorers” reaches the hands-in-the-air mania as effectively as their previous singles. But with its timbale breakdown, a chorus melody with sharp contours rather than flabby curves, it’s just a reminder of what you're missing out on here.
Free Your Mind has a personality, at least. It’s a concept album of sorts, taking you out of the desert (Coachella’s EDM-friendly Sahara Tent?), above the city and... something about the waves. You wouldn’t think they’d have much more to say about holistic healing and solar-religiosity after ending Zonoscope with a 15-minute song named “Sun God", and they don’t really, though it doesn’t stop them from trying—the lyrical component of Free Your Mind is straight Screamadelica magnet poetry about us getting higher/shining brighter than the sun and getting free and getting loaded. And while Whitford’s slack affectations are pitch-perfect on “Free Your Mind”, elsewhere the same effect just means he’s singing off key, capturing the tone of his influences, but lacking the necessary rock-star posturing.
If this seems like an unusual amount of focus on Cut Copy’s lyrics, it’s because the music itself seems content to keep the beat and little else. Though it’s every bit as sequentially-formatted as In Ghost Colours or Zonoscope, Free Your Mind lacks the dynamism of its predecessors, the DJ-curated ebb and flow. You can laugh at the ridiculous spoken word interludes, but they’re about the only thing that can jar you out of the mid-album lull created as Free Your Mind goes forward. With few exceptions, it’s basically a Cut Copy album that’s just deep cuts—you get the same octave-jumping funk basslines (“In Memory Capsule”), the occasional acoustic-laced pop-rock (“Dark Corners & Mountain Tops”) and slow-moving disco-pop from their past records, only with lumpier melodies and Dave Fridmann’s mixing job using reverb like packing peanuts to make Free Your Mind sound both puffy and stiff.
Cut Copy’s music has always been simple; the difficult part was trying to explain in non-illusory terms what made Bright Like Neon Love, In Ghost Colours and Zonoscope glorious and uplifting rather than silly or even flat out dumb. My take is that they had omnivorous enough taste to show they take their craft seriously, while avoiding crowd-moving mock profundity and proving they don’t take themselves all that serious. Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative.
