Album Review: Echomatica

Tāmaki Makaurau shoegazing dream popsters Echomatica precociously arrive at greatness with their blazingly self-assured debut album. From opening track Breathe in, they come on like the kind of band David Lynch would book to play the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks. They’re a little bit Cocteau Twins, often on their choruses, and serve much up on a banging bed of 1995 vintage Garbage vibes. You can hear a good example of the former on Heartbeat, and the latter on What Is This, which reminds me of Garbage’s A Stroke of Luck, while striking its own, 30 years-hence course. 

Love Isn’t Always was a 95bFM Top 10 No. 1, an RDU Top 10 No. 7, an SRN Top 10 No. 2, and a Radioscope Alt Chart No. 11. It’s gorgeous to see a band so new deliver a song so confident in its slinky swagger, but typical of Echomatica’s massive capability. 

Something was a 95bFM and RadioScope Alt chart No. 2, and an SRN Top 10 No. 9, and gained the band a following bigger than these shaky isles. It strums open like The Cure’s In Between Days, showcasing a confident balance between organic and electronic instrumentation. The Cure fans will also feel welcomed to the fold by Fragile World, and Pretending We’re Human.

It’s a pleasure to pick up on the influence of some of the darkly danceable majesty of Siouxsie and the Banshees too, particularly on Waves. This track comes on like a rampage in a high school, a song tearing around, looking for a soundtrack to detonate. (Think about the scene in the classic 1984 teen flick Reckless, where Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah trash their high school to Kim Wilde’s Kids in America, and you’ll get the feeling. It feels born that classic already.) It perfectly encapsulates how Echomatica roll nostalgia in freshness, and smoke it. They remind me of The Naked and Famous in this way. 

Comparisons aside (although, who can resist a band who sound like they’ve been locked in a van with a pile of epic late 20th Century mix tapes, and left to simmer in the pulsing glow of the car stereo’s graphic equaliser?), some really nice EDM beats anchor lush arrangements, adorned by Charlie Maclean’s dreamy vocals. 

The best music by a young band (no matter the members’ chronological ages) manages to sound not only entirely fresh – capturing that all-powerful essence of themselves – but to instil the feeling of being entirely fresh upon the listener. New as they are, it feels like I have already loved Echomatica forever, as if I have unearthed an old CD made decades ahead of its time. 

“How does it feel to be so young?” their latest single – Month of Sundays – asks like it already knows. Its video subverts the teenage nostalgia of the lyrics with a cheerily psychotic stop motion sequence by Scarlett Dutton (AKA gimme.blood), all candy-coloured shades of a Sweeney Todd summer. It’s some sick fun, and incongruously bright. You may hear this song pouring out of many car stereos this summer. 

Echomatica: ‘I wanna keep you.’