Empire of the Sun: Ask That God review – the magic’s still there

(EMI)
Eight years on from their last album, the Australian duo’s fabulist nostalgia-pop is a triumph of feeling over artifice

The music industry doesn’t offer participation prizes, but if it did, Australian duo Luke “Emperor” Steele and Nick “Lord” Littlemore, AKA Empire of the Sun, deserve flowers. Their work comes freighted with so much cape-swishing, astral-travelling effort. The pair’s speciality is fabulist nostalgia-pop: songs with as few sharp edges as possible, swaddled in sleek, shiny futurist imagery reminiscent of 80s fantasy movies such as Labyrinth. Their lyrics brim with the thrill of kids on a beach digging up amulets. Eight years since solid last album Two Vines, that spell is largely unbroken.

Like their three previous projects, this one contains at least two elite tunes (Changes, Cherry Blossom) interspersed with effervescent yet evanescent second-tier tracks (Revolve, Music on the Radio, Ask That God) and smoothly produced non-bangers (everything else). As usual, there’s a ballad seeking the vibe of a romcom’s penultimate scene – the tear-soaked tux at the graduation ball – that’s fatally hobbled by Steele’s effect-laden vocal. His candyfloss tones sound strangely insincere whenever the tempo drops. Mostly, though, Empire of the Sun make you forget all the artifice that’s gone into creating their music and let you collapse happily into the emotions it evokes.