Free Your Mind

Remarkably devoid of pretensions, Free Your Mind is a dance record boiled down to its most essential, body-shaking elements, and the purest distillation of Cut Copy’s music and their ethos yet.

It’s good to have them back.

Though the tracklist looks like a normal-length album, in the end there are only nine real songs to take in, and they are easily unified by the musical choices Cut Copy has made.

Free Your Mind is ego-free party music that will fit comfortably onto a variety of dance floors.

Cut Copy may have left behind the monochromatic brilliance of their early work, but the explosion of colors they've added like Jackson Pollock on a bender has only made their growth more interesting and enriching.

Nearly every track is a highlight; these are accentuated by brief detours into psychedelic space.

The only issue is that some tracks are slightly overlong, and the trio of short interludes feel unnecessary--threatening to pull you out of the moment and stifle the gradually escalating sense of euphoria. This is a small complaint, however, given the consistently infectious hooks and melodies, and the manner in which it brilliantly and wistfully evokes rose-tinted memories of the lost Golden Age of dance.

Perhaps less instantly gratifying than the shimmering ‘Zonoscope’, Free Your Mind is nevertheless a great time that provides additional rewards for those willing to disentangle its layered arrangements.

A few too many tone-shifting interludes slow down momentum, but “Free Your Mind,” “We Are Explorers,” and “In Memory Capsule” in particular are a welcoming embrace into a sea of moving bodies and blinking lights that extends as far as the eye can see.

Free Your Mind, looks to the two summers of love--psychedelia in 1967 and rave in '89--for inspiration and is mixed by Tame Impala's guru Dave Fridmann, yet its tasteful blend of chugging acid and euphoric choruses means it resembles an elaborate Screamadelica pastiche. [Dec 2013, p.66]

Cut Copy may not hit the same cloud-bursting heights as a masterpiece like Primal Scream's Screamadelica did, but their attempt still provides devilish delights. [Dec 2013, p.94]

It’s nothing new, but it is fun.

Penultimate track “Walking In The Sky” would have been a satisfying closer, but the hazy “Mantra” makes the record land with a thud instead of a bang. Nixing these tracks would have made Free Your Mind a taut, focused effort instead of the distracted, occasionally brilliant record that it is.

Ultimately, it’s a hypnotic and intermittently enjoyable experience, which whilst a little overextended and at times as shallow as the music it pastiches, marks a convincing enough return for Cut Copy.

Groundbreaking, this ain’t. But then again, are you trying to raze a barn or get your groove on? Album-specific flourishes don’t surprise.

Free Your Mind manages to be Cut Copy's most homogenous and it's most "message-based" record yet, and in doing little other than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, there’s precious little separating it from the vapid electro-pop to which Cut Copy used to be an alternative.

It's time for Cut Copy to free its own mind too. [Dec 2013, p.89]

The result is that you're having fun--on tracks like the stellar title-track and the popping candy overload of 'Let Me Show You Love' you can't help it--but increasingly it feels hollow... almost kitsch, and deep down you know that you, and the band, can really do better.

Like most earnest attempts to reimagine the past, it’s an entertaining indulgence. One that exists to stave off the nagging question: what comes next?

It's a 'take it or leave it' kind of record, but invest in Cut Copy's deranged aims and it'll feel like being part of a free-spirited cult.

While their venture into psychedelia was a failed experiment, everything about Free Your Mind, from its title to its monotonous songs, is undeniably lazy.

Considering their rather straightforward musical blueprint, every Cut Copy album is a bit of a recycle job, but Free Your Mind seems excessively so, almost to the point of motorized lifelessness.

The major misstep on Free Your Mind is eschewing those decent lyrical impulses in favor of rather limp and unaccomplished (and repeated!) inanities such as “free your mind” and “shine on,” phrases that should be confined, respectively, to the lexicons of aging hippies and Roger Waters.

The record is so one-note it makes its predecessor sound like an entire season at the London Philharmonic.