Description
//Impressed Recordings//
£24.99 – 1xLP, Standard Edition Vinyl
You may think that you know what a solo record by a member of the Australian rock’n’roll band, Jet, is going to sound like, but you do not.
That’s because you are yet to press play on Cam Muncey & the Delusions of Grandeur the brilliant new album by Jet guitarist and co-founder Cam Muncey. A world removed from the up and at ‘em crunching guitar anthems of his day job, Muncey’s debut album is a daring and adventurous trip into the wild, one that explores a sonic landscape he has left untouched in his work with the band he formed with brothers, Nic and Chris Cester, in 2001.
An expansive and mellow solo debut, a record that uses its reference points as loose directions on the way to something entirely of its own. Guided by Muncey’s warm, melodious vocals, it’s an album that pulls you in and takes you on a journey. On the way, you’ll pass by hazy, psychedelic Americana (No Rock’n’Roll Star, in which the singer questions his rock star credentials), minor-chord splendour (stirring torch song I’ve Been Low), kaleidoscopic psychedelic-rock grooves (the Tame Impala-ish Breathing Again and the shimmering, retro-futuristic pop of Arrhythmia) and hypnotic, space-y ballads (Daylight, Dark Mind, which sees Muncey revisiting the nocturnal-heavy routines of life in his twenties, and the gently stirring I Am Playing With Your Heart).
Elsewhere, Take A Chance, in which Muncey transplants himself back to his north London neighbourhood during the 2011 London riots, is a swirling, soulful piano-pop gem whilst Quarantine is a woozy, acoustic number with a sideways look back on crazy Covid times. Melbourne had a particularly heavy lockdown. “I remember at the beginning, they were saying, ‘It’s in the grass!’” he says, incredulously. “I was worried if I went out, like, ‘How long before the Covid has left the grass? Is it still on the grass?’. They had us washing our groceries!’
If there’s a song that sums up the way ‘Cam Muncey & the Delusions of Grandeur’ pulls you in and makes you want to stay, it’s ‘Friendly’: a breezy, 80s pop number that has a pleasing lightness of touch and easy-come-easy-go feel about it before you realise its chorus has been lodged in your head for a week.
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