Exotic, gaudy and lavish, Empire Of The Sun brings together two unlikely collaborators from Australian pop. Luke Steele, the enigmatic wunderkind behind The Sleepy Jackson, first met Pnau’s Nick Littlemore via a mundane hook-up instigated by the latter’s record company.
Thus began a friendship which Luke describes as “this fireball of electricity”, and which eventually resulted in ‘Walking On A Dream’ – a bold, visionary and quite brilliant album, which manages to sound exhilaratingly contemporary, audaciously forward-looking, yet also curiously archaic all at once. From Nick and Luke’s collective unconscious arose a rare marriage of rock and electronica, immediacy and depth, futurism and tradition, hi-tech production and creative spontaneity, pop melody and the cinematic.
Perhaps the most positive sign that Empire Of The Sun are onto something good, is that they’re hard to pin down with easy reference points. For a fleeting moment, you might hear an echo of Chic’s hi-tech disco, or Fleetwood Mac’s sheeny pop, or even the dream-like phantasmagoria of Mercury Rev…but then it’s gone, and other sound and images coalesce in its place
So, in the months ahead, the duo are preparing to carry through on their audio-visual vision for their band, their creation. They have already shot a video for their album’s title track in Shanghai (location of Spielberg’s movie). Luke: “It was pretty technicolour. It was done pretty renegade style, it’s illegal to film there. We had to do the make-up in the car.”
Their exotic costumes naturally weren’t best suited to such undercover work, and at one point they nearly got arrested.
There are now plans to film further clips in Mexico, Iceland and Las Vegas, with the ultimate goal of using them all as a backdrop for the duo’s debut live extravaganza, which should kick off some time in 2009. Given the unusual track records of both the band’s constituent members – not to mention the jaw-dropping magnificence of their debut album together – it’s safe to assume that those shows will bring entertainment, colour and all the otherworldly things in abundance.
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