The Brag

Oscar + Martin
Pop Is Not A Dirty Word
By Caitlin Welsh

Oscar + Martin will have to endure their share of clunky phoenix-from-the-ashes references in the press, but the analogy doesn’t quite work. The demise last year of their old band, the much-loved art-pop collective Psuche, was less a fiery destruction than a shrugging evolution born of the members’ wanderings. The five-piece was whittled down to Oscar Slorach-Thorn and Martin King as, one by one, the others left Melbourne for Berlin and London and higher-education institutions and love affairs. “Me and Oscar were left here still with a bunch of shows to play, and so we had to work something out between us,” explains King, over the phone from Melbourne. “Obviously in that time the music changed as well.

“It was a bit awkward to cut the band down to the two of us, but there’s no bad blood between all the members now.” In fact, he adds, they were all together a few weekends ago, for Psuche alum Ruby Green’s wedding to Chris Bolton (aka Seagull, one of Oscar + Martin’s Two Bright Lakes labelmates). “It was amazing, it was just at a yacht club with all these sets of family – just pared-back family, not particularly religious or anything, just a really nice party. My other band The Harpoons played the reception, and everybody was dancing, the parents and everything, It was beautiful.”

Cutting loose a little seems to have worked wonders for Oscar + Martin. Their debut full-length, For You, is a slinky, heartfelt gem of a pop record, with Oscar’s clear, hesitant falsetto chattering and fluttering over hopscotch beats and feathery samples to create something like the lovechild of James Blake and Architecture In Helsinki. (This writer recently spotted a reference to “R’n’Twee”, but refuses to help perpetuate any more absurd spliced sub-genres.) More importantly, it’s lighter and more upbeat than most of Psuche’s output, confirming that O+M are definitely a horse of a different colour. “I think it’s just more fun, really,” King agrees. “I think that’s kind of the main difference. It used to be a bit more serious, but now we just get up on stage and have a dance and have fun. We mess around in a way that I felt we never could in the old band.”

Psuche, King says, would often become fixated on musicality and pushing boundaries in subtle ways. “Having said that, it wasn’t like we were like, ‘No, it has to go like this because that’s the most musical way to do it’,” he explains. “We just thought too much about it, thought too much about the music. Nowadays if it feels good we just play it and go from there … I think it took a long time for us to just relax and just goof around and not worry as much what it sounded like.”

Their influences have shifted as well; King says that for him, what used to be a mere fondness for 90s R&B has developed into a full-time habit. “I sometimes think that 90s (and early 2000s) R&B is the epitome of all music,” he confides later, in a follow-up email. “It has no restraints stylistically or aesthetically, it was never afraid to be cheesy (perhaps because it is the source of what is considered cheesy these days), nor was it afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve. Alicia Keys’ first album Songs In A Minor is a masterpiece (though I’m not sure Oscar would agree with me on that one).” King’s well aware of the resurgence in indie circles of 90s-influenced R&B, from James Blake’s gossamer bedroom-soul to the universal adoration of slow-jam alchemists The Weeknd. “I think it was just R&B’s time to come back around, you know?”

Those influences are more visible on some tracks than others. The centerpiece of For You, ‘What I Know’, is a gentle slow-jam, built on a slouching Psuche sample dragging a muffled beat behind it, and featuring the honeyed tones of King’s Harpoons bandmate Bec Rigby. It’s one of a couple of tracks that started more as King’s creation, and he takes obvious pride in it – both lyrically and emotionally, For You is skewed towards Slorach-Thorn. “It’s no secret that a lot of the album is about Oscar’s recently broken heart,” he says, though he assures me it’s very much a collaborative effort. “Oscar wrote around 90% of the lyrics on the album and put together most of the song structures, and we share the production and arrangement when we work together on the recordings.”

The duo also listen to a lot of J Dilla and Madlib, the go-to icons for inventive beats, and both Slorach-Thorn and King are involved in beatmaking and production for R&B and hip hop projects in Melbourne. But King says that their more eclectic influences all still go towards the one end: good pop songs. “I think we both had to come to terms with the idea of making pop music,” he admits. “I think a few years ago we would have been a little scared of the simplicity of the pop form – verse/chorus/bridge – but really, that form exists for a reason, which is that it is awesome.”

What: For You is out now on Two Bright Lakes, through Remote Control