Emerging Sydney collective, Left Syndicate, “Run Wild” on their gleefully layered and yet beautifully dour debut, delivering a record of driving art pysch and electro rock held together in a tight tangle of beats, synth and old fashioned rock’n’roll swagger.
Led and creatively driven by Dan Campbell and Daniel Reynolds, and featuring the talents of Jeff Doukakis & Tim Coggins, the group settled in to Leichhardt’s Parliament Studios to cut their first LP in a collaborative process guided by producer Phan Sharif.
Campbell describes the origins of the album: “We wanted to do something away from just high-energy guitar sounds, to try to create a dreamscape that inhabited and described its own world, a place inspired by dreams but also grown out of a response to our modern technological landscape. I think the atmosphere on the record is an uneasy sense of creative vulnerability and awareness of anonymity, but also discovering opportunity and freedom in the digital void.”
Run Wild leapt in to that digital void on September 28 and has won a growing following across various platforms, and from occasionally unlikely sources. “For a new band we have been growing in the Shazam space. Our single ‘Sail’ has been hitting over 1000 ‘shazams’ a month, which was an encouraging surprise. Run Wild is doing well on Facebook and received 10,000 views in its first two weeks of release.”
The slickly shaded noir of the likes of Interpol haunt Dan Campbell’s deliciously wearied vocal style, tiptoe balancing between punk fervour and a playful conversation around creative identity in a world deluged by social media, one in which the nature of reality itself is up for debate. Lean, effortlessly involving, and pulsing with urgent longing, Run Wild is an album of caustically brittle but artfully layered electro rock, smoothed by exuberant swells of irrepressible melodic mood and dance party abandonment.
Campbell explains the disparate elements that fed in to Left Syndicate’s sonic palette: “We were looking for really futuristic electronic sounds with the warm familiarity of that ’80s vibe… we wanted to modernise it and bring our new wave style that to make that more edgier, late night dance electro twist. We leaned on Tim Coggins to bring his synth collection into the studio and we were really into this ’70s sound with Profit keyboards and messing around with midi racks to give each song and arrangement its own texture. Phan had the vision and really got us into a strange place that we never expected, and that felt at times like a jigsaw puzzle to me.”
Almost an explosive embarrassment of ideas, the album is fuelled by an assured and cockily confident range of imagination. The feeling is of a record where creative decisions were ruled by a ruthless paring back of competing fascinations, rather than any song being approached as anything as notionally lazy as an ‘album track’ or empty filler. There is a real symphonic ambition to this album, a desire to build with freewheeling experimentation to surprising effect upon the bare bones of each song. Left Syndicate’s charismatic pulse and obsessive attention to sonic detail sustain Run Wild effortlessly through its 30 minute journey in to the cyberscape – shouting in to the void, listening carefully to the voices that echo back.
Reviewer : Tim Onslow