- After five years without releasing a full length project, Australian electro-indie artist SPOD has returned with his fourth album, Adult Fantasy. Combining synth chords with dreary, yet strangely engaging vocals, SPOD may appear, at first listen, to be reminiscent of a bygone electronic era. However, it is with multiple delves into Adult Fantasy that the singer-songwriter’s true lyrical prowess begins to present itself. The album, thematically, is a combination of both the real elements of adult life and some more fantastical ones. Layered over lush instrumentals, SPOD explores the natural fear of life and death in a very adult way and in another wholly different sense of ‘adult’, crafts a sexual dream.
Beginning the fantastical quality of the album, the opening track My Body Is Ready is a fast paced ninety seconds of chanting and hard clapping drums. Exploding with anticipation, SPOD launches into a laidback but still intense love jam entitled (what else?) Sexual Fantasy. Lyrically, the song promises to please its intended partner harder than a Donny Benet track, though without ever getting quite as worked up as that fellow Rice Is Nice artist.
Contrasting the sexual energy of the previous track, SPOD begs the audience to make good their wrongdoings before death on album standout Make Things Right. The song plays as if death itself were staring over the audience’s shoulder. Its tension combines and contrasts with warm, inviting synths making for a welcome experience. SPOD uses the chorus of the song to his advantage, as a way of presenting the message like a burrowing ear-worm, impossible to get out of your head.
SPOD reflects on adult responsibility in Becomes a Wife, a pop number dedicated to the realisation that part of growing up means taking a long term relationship to the next level. The vocals are sultry, much like those of fellow Australian artist Jack Ladder, who himself appears later in the project. SPOD uses his instrumentals to complement the upbeat quality of the song, bringing it to a conclusion that is sure to leave a smile on your face.
After a series of autotuned ballads and new wave instrumental cuts, SPOD brings the album to a close with the dire Everybody Dies. Here he manages to combine, perfectly, those more prosaic life lessons with flights of pure, adult fantasy; it’s a summation of the entire project. The final message? Whatever fantasy world you live in, eventually time catches up, so -if you’ll forgive my turn of phrase- get busy!
The proper closing track, Golden Gaytime, is a novelty of a song and simultaneously one of the most entertaining and tedious cuts of the year. Spanning forty-five minutes, it’s essentially a bonus project where SPOD brings together every artist he knows to perform their own, individual solo. Reaching across the entire globe, he enlists the help of several notable Australians: Jack Ladder, DZ Deathrays and frequent Alex Cameron collaborator, saxophonist Roy Malloy.
SPOD’s Adult Fantasy is one of the more interesting Australian records to drop in 2019. A teetering tower of 80’s clichés, somehow it turns every one of them to its advantage. From a substrate of sexual desire, through themes of responsibility, life and death it rises like excitement and frothing cream. What finally jets out of your speakers is a thought provoking, all encompassing, adult experience.
- James Chadwick.