The Green Child Look Familiar
- Format
12 Inch
Black
£16.00
On first listen, Look Familiar is an album built on a certain spartan simplicity and the momentum of looping repetition. Yet as you immerse yourself deeper into its rather bewitching embrace, its delicately subtle secrets reveal themselves almost imperceptibly.
Look Familiar is the third full-length from Melbourne-based The Green Child, and the follow-up to 2020’s Shimmering Bassett. Brightly shimmering guitar and a metronomic rhythm section that locks into driving motorik beats and more limber, supple cadences with equal understated relish, provide the album’s bedrock.
Glistening synths intertwine recurring melodic motifs throughout, while the flourishes of lead guitar are, at times, surprisingly strident, and further depth is added by flares of sombre violin. It would be easy to become lost in this dream-like reverie. Each track, however, retains its own vivid charms, especially, perhaps, the chiming propulsion of the opening Wow Factor, the vibrantly layered Easy Window, and the gently escalating dissonance of Year Of The Books.
The vocals emerge, semi-chanted, enigmatically melodic, floating above this sonic tapestry in ethereal synchronicity. Their intense yet hazy, trance-like quality, and the wider psychedelic glow that envelopes the album, reflect lyrical themes that delve both into family memory and more contemporary concerns, evoking our increasingly fragile grasp of what is real and what is not.
The title track itself refers to a ‘monumental haze’. Yet the album sweeps forward with an unwavering impetus, conjuring a hypnotic, ever-shifting patchwork of both memory and chimera. The warming colours and spectral figures of the beautiful artwork, taken from a 1991 painting by Raven Mahon’s (bass / vocals) mum Jane, are a perfect fit.