It’s funny, but psyche is rarely a genre I listen to outside of the summer months. There’s just something about the light sounds that drift from the speakers that evoke images of long summer days, lazily smoking incense sticks, and cool jugs of iced beer. This is certainly the case with Flat Planet, the latest album from Robi Mitch. An eclectic and engaging record, it finds Robi exploring psyche and ambient over the course of thirteen eclectic tracks.
Built around a skittering, jazzy beat and the haunting tones of the mellotron, opening track Chasing splits the difference between sun-kissed psyche and Beck, all funky guitar stabs and airy vocals, drawing you out toward the wide horizon depicted on the cover. Following a brief, Orb-esque segue in the form of (Long Long Time), we find ourselves in the nostalgic funk of By Storm which, oddly, sounds like Miss Europa Disco Dancer from the unfairly unloved Manic Street Preachers’ album, Know Your Enemy. It’s followed by the whimsical Hanging On, which takes a sideways step into the multi-hued world of The Flaming Lips, all twinkling keyboards and hazy, childlike melodies.
With the tone of the album firmly established in a netherworld where little fluffy clouds combine with giant robots and and losers, Robi delivers the shuffling beat and catchy chorus of Get Home Tonight, which has a lovely lo-fi pulse to it. Yet, for all the album exists in a parallel universe beset by mellifluous melodies, every once in a while, it has a sting in the tail, as it does on Animals, which worries about the destruction being wrought upon the world.
The ambient funk sound of the opening tracks returns for Looking For Some Connection, which sounds like latter-day Beck hobnobbing with Folk Implosion, while the somnolent On A Cloudy Day sounds exactly as its title might imply, just drifting dreamily along toward the random Bowie-isms of On My Way.
The album takes a slightly tougher direction as the wiry Riding Through The Jungle, with its “why are you trying to shut me down” refrain over a stabbing synth line that sounds like early Depeche Mode. A sense of whimsy returns for August, which (musically) could easily have been drawn from latter-day Genesis. Another short segue named (Only Sky) follows, before Taipei Violet throws unexpectedly skronky shards of guitar into the mix.
Two bonus tracks (seemingly not found on the digital version) wrap things up. The easy-going Drift does exactly what it says on the tin, while the dreamy road-pop of Talk To Strangers nods to Gorillaz.
The perfect album for a lazy, sunny afternoon, Flat Earth does not pretend to be anything other than it is – a sweetly melodic lo-fi trip that takes you on a dreamy little journey for forty-minutes or so. With elements of Beck (specifically Colours-era), Gorillaz, Folk Implosion, and Flaming Lips floating through the mix, it has a great lineage and, for those who love to just let the world pass on by for a while, it’s an understated gem. 8.5/10
