Newer Order

Cut Copy Sept. 21 and 22, Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-353-1600; 7, $22/$25.

If you’re not willing to accept autumn’s onset, look to Australia’s Cut Copy and the group’s sunny, excessively upbeat electro pop for evidence that an endless summer exists just beyond the horizon. In Ghost Colours, the sophomore album from this southern hemispheric trio, plays like an exuberant soundtrack to a summer filled with blinding silver suns, colliding hearts and unspoken emotions. With song titles like “Hearts on Fire” and “Feel the Love,” its sugarcoated love paeans call to mind the feeling of being 15 and woozy with the anticipation of a first kiss.

Though In Ghost Colours flawlessly weaves dance music’s effervescent energy with pop song structures, Dan Whitford, Cut Copy’s frontman, says the three weren’t consciously cultivating an amalgamation of genres. Instead, the fusion simply cropped up organically during their songwriting process.

“Maybe it’s a product of having a fairly short attention span, or maybe being into a whole bunch of different types of music…but it’s not that often that we’d stick to writing a song that sits in one style all the way through,” Whitford says. He explains that most of Cut Copy’s songs interlace pop elements and guitar-based aspects with dance production. “It might be that we start writing one way and get bored and shift the sound of a song midway through. I don’t know exactly why it happens, but our music tends to sit between genres a lot of the time.”

Cut Copy mined decades of music for inspiration for its latest album, fashioning a buoyant mix of pop, prog rock and psychedelica that repays the attention paid to it, and with every listen, the complexity of its textures becomes more apparent. 

“To me this record represents ’70s pop music and Kraut-rock and psychedelic disco and pop more than ’80s music. But we grew up in the ’80s, so it’s probably a subconscious influence,” Whitford says. “My voice has a bit of a Bernard Sumner sound about it…and there’s probably some part of our songwriting that ends up reflecting that New Order sound even when we’re not trying to.”

Whitford counts the band lucky to have linked up with Tim Goldsworthy, producer, programming extraordinaire and co-founder of DFA Records, for the production of In Ghost Colours. Though all the members of Cut Copy were familiar with Goldsworthy’s illustrious history, Whitford initially met Goldsworthy through a conference call.

“It was this really weird sort of introduction process,” Whitford says. “Once they’d gotten the chaperoning aspect out it of the way, everyone else got off the line, and Tim and I started chatting about music and sort of hit it off straight away. He knew exactly where we were coming from.”

Having heard the demo, Goldsworthy immediately pinpointed some of Cut Copy’s key influences, which included My Bloody Valentine and ELO, Whitford says.

“He picked out ELO’s Time as a record that he saw all these parallels with ours—which was funny because it was the record we’d been listening to endlessly for the past three or four years when we were working on new material,” Whitford says. “Time is a very synth-oriented, spacey ELO album, and I think there’s definitely an electronic edge to all of our music, as well as pop, so I guess those are perhaps the aspects that reminded Tim of the album.”

Goldsworthy is known for his emphasis on melding live instrumentation with electronics in the dance music he produces, and he worked with Cut Copy to rerecord much of the album for a warmer, more unified sound. Whitford says he learned a great deal from Goldsworthy’s approach and openness to exploration, both of which have served Goldsworthy well.

“It’s interesting looking at his track record, what albums he’s worked on recently—he’s had sort of the magic touch,” Whitford says, referring in particular to the immense success of the self-titled debut of the dance music titans Hercules and Love Affair, which Goldsworthy co-produced. “It’s sort of funny watching him go to work. You can almost imagine him tinkering away all day like some sort of scientist.”

And to more closely mirror the melodic sound of its records, Cut Copy’s live show has evolved from a noisy free-for-all to controlled chaos, Whitford says.

“When we started out is was very much an experiment for us, sort of throwing together this garage band idea, inspired very much by the stuff we were into in the ‘90s, Pavement and Sonic Youth and that sort of thing. None of us were really amazing musicians, so when we thought of the idea of putting together a show, the emphasis was on being non-musicians,” he admits. “But I think we’ve improved probably a little bit since then, so the show, while it still has the raw energy of our original idea, I think musically we’re a bit more adept now.”