After a handful of singles and EPs over the last seven years, we finally get a long player from Melbourne DJ and producer Tornado Wallace – aka Lewis Day – and boy was it worth the wait.
Day’s nostalgia-fueled production style has matured and been realised in the form of seven gorgeous tracks. Crunchy ‘80s drum machine beats cruise along at a leisurely pace underneath heavily chorus and reverb effected guitars. Classic synth basslines ride the grooves while kaleidoscopic synth chords and lead lines drift off into space. So much of the charm of this record is in its use of space, extra percussion and reverberating samples populating each track without ever crowding the sound stage.
Sui Zhen joins Day on Today and provides the only vocals found on the album.She perfectly complements the heaving toms with her effect laden semi-spoken word style alongside chopped up vocals samples interspersed throughout the background.
As hinted by the cover art, thematically the album draws a lot from Mother Nature and, despite it’s clear Balearic influences, somehow sounds distinctly Australian. Kingdom Animalia really drives that home with bird calls and water sounds dancing around a synth arpeggio.
Lonely Planet is a fantastic album, it brings to mind soaring over outback Australia in a helicopter, or strolling through tropical Queensland, or even a lonely late night drunken train ride. Absolute bliss.
By Michael Cusack
