Ice on the Dune

It’s like the best bits of MGMT, The Scissor Sisters and The Sleepy Jackson rolled into one.

The vintage-Daft Punk cheese platter "Celebrate" and album-ending­ Bowie joke "Keep a Watch" are foamy fun, but too often Ice on the Dune just feels like a lobotomy on the dance floor.

Alive and Concert Pitch are deliriously upbeat confections, but a whole album in that vein could be capable of inducing dental caries at 50 paces. Thankfully, the second half finds them in more restrained--but no less winning--mood.

Their stuff floats off, and the synths carry the whiff not of a beach breeze but of a department-store escalator.

It’s neither better nor worse than Dream, but for all that talk of “pushing through four dimensions” (“Surround Sound”), the album remains planted in its comfort zone.

Ice on the Dune is a pretty impressive pop album. But it's hard not to wonder what might have been had just a bit of the fanciful imagination that goes into the visual side of Empire of the Sun been allowed to seep in.

The songs and melodies may be brighter, but there is a nagging sense throughout that something special has been lost somewhere in the process.

While it's debatable whether Empire Of The Sun deliver on a stated aim to make music that's "transcendental," you'll have a lot of fun hearing them try. [Jul 2013, p.85]

[The title track] like the rest of this exceptional LP, works fine as one chapter in an elaborate concept opus, but is just as satisfying for those with both feet in reality. [Jul 2013, p.98]

The problem is, when you project a futuristic, magical and otherworldly image, you’d better have the sounds to match. And unfortunately, Ice On The Dune is a four-to-the-floor electro-pop album that has literally nothing to do with the cheesy fable invented to go with it.

Ice on the Dune is a seamless suite of elegiac synthpop, with fairydust-flecked melodies, a perpetually peaking bass end, chord changes that reach into your heart, and fantasising falsetto vocals.

The guys in Empire of the Sun manage to not only catch the lightning again, but their skill at crafting perfect pop, the depth in their songs, and the emotion their voices transmit make this record better than one might have ever expected. Modern pop doesn't get any better than this.

On track after track, the falsetto vocals and surging electropop pulses ultimately congeal into too saccharine a sonic experience, an artificially sweetened aural marshmallow.

Like all good records, it has its magpie moments too - the Justice / Daft Punk tinged one-two of ‘Celebrate’ and ‘Surround Sound’ especially effective in the current climate--but fundamentally Ice On The Dune is the definitive Empire Of The Sun album.

Harnessing a number of pop hit-making producers and mixers guarantees Ice On The Dune the requisite polish and shininess necessary for everyman's ear. On their own, however, the songs still have the relentless hooks, the danceable rhythms, the chiseled melodies, plus the mysterious lyricism that production alone cannot create. [Jun-Jul 2013, p.86]

In essence, Ice On The Dune is pure pop with a twist--like a modern day 10cc, or ELO using synths instead of strings. [Jul 2013, p.75]

Ice On The Dune is patchy, and shows little progression from 2008 debut, ‘Walking On A Dream’.

Perhaps with a little more nuance they can exploit the potential of their partnership to be one of the most intriguing electro-pop duos around--but on Ice on the Dune that potential remains unrealised.