Surprise Chef: Daylight Savings | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- From the gentle exotica at the opening of Surprise Chef’s new long-player Daylight Savings -the birdsong and traffic noise- you can tell: something is funky in the state of Coburg.

There’s a particular flavour of retro minimalist, thoughtfully textured, tonally sophisticated jams emerging right now from the College Of Knowledge, the small but influential and ubiquitous cult of musos and lovers that centre around the same suburb that also houses producer Nick Herrera’s infamous studio: The Grove.

Describing their sound as cinematic soul is pretty spot on. Though the compositions sometimes sound deceptively simple, they have the understated sophistication of Lalo Schifrin or Ennio Morricone. Evocative in the extreme, intricately constructed, and played with the sure-footedness of the session players they so clearly admire.

Everyone on this record is a veteran player with several projects on the go, so it’s no surprise they’re taking sonic cues from some of history’s greatest producer-arrangers: Surprise Chef comes from that alternate timeline where Serge Gainsbourg and David Axelrod actually met in the NMIT music program.

Sonically, this new record sees a lot more synthesiser in the arrangements and an overall increased density that makes it the logical successor to debut album All News Is Good News. Cuts like New Ferrari give a more straight-ahead jazz-funk feel, recalling Bob James on Nautilus, whereas Leave It, Don’t Take It carries some upbeat percussion freak-out parts that are really gonna get your lu-wow jumping. They exist in a continuum with acts like the Bamboos and The Putbacks, hell even the Dirty Three: classic tone-junkies who will keep pumping out dusty original jams until a singer comes along, and then go right back to more dusty jams afterwards..

Surprise Chef are running on their own track, recording in their own spot with the best and brightest from their little pocket of the world, like they could put out a record this effortlessly classic every year for the next decade. If all the talented personnel from Daylight Savings don’t move on to other things, they might just do that.

With their cousin-bands like Karate Boogaloo and Snooch Dodd and the Pro-Teens coming through strong, we might look around one day and realise every album we see has had Surprise Chef’s fat-splattered mitts on it in some way. That wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.

- Kieran Ruffles.