Free Your Mind is pretty much flawless, unashamed of its frequent moments of cheesiness and its less than fashionable influences, and stuffed full of absolute “bangerz”, as I believe the kids say these days; and in a year already bulging with great albums, it’s a genuine last-minute AOTY contender.
Free Your Mind won't surpass Screamadelica on any lists — it's far too much indebted to both that record and era — but you'll have a difficult time finding an album in 2013 that's as utterly energizing and sublime as this.
Free Your Mind as a whole is a record that matches that almost religious experience of being at that lucid club show that connects instead of merely entertains, where an artist is genuinely interested in meeting the audience halfway.
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.
Dance tent, main stage, club, arena: The songs will connect anywhere, and when they tour the shit out of this album in 2014, only a fool would bet against this set of songs connecting everywhere.
Free Your Mind begins unassumingly as a cleverly-structured pop record, but evolves into a more meditative endeavor—without missing a beat of the fun.
If you've got some kind of shindig on the horizon that necessitates a DJ, just whack on Free Your Mind. The group traipse through a multitude of electric genres, leaning especially to the dance of twenty years ago, but nodding to other vital eras too.
On the day-glo ‘Free Your Mind’, they’ve remembered there’s nothing inherently wrong with channelling a love for house, electro and dreamy acoustic strum-alongs into intelligent, radio-friendly bangers.
The LP is revisionary as opposed to revolutionary, owing much in style and substance to Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, but it’s successful because Cut Copy reflect past sounds via the prism of modern pop, refining and rechanneling their influences in the process.
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.
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.
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.
Beats land heavy and strong, keyboards and synths ring out like beacons of truth, and Dan Whitford’s feather-light voice seems to float through the air. A lack of focus, however, keeps the album inches from greatness.
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.
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.
Injecting a little psychedelia helps their sound, though even at its most hallucinatory it doesn’t even come close to approaching the most accessible moments of the mind-warping, isolation tank-inspired Matmos album The Marriage of True Minds from earlier this year.
This ‘try anything once’ mindset is repeated too many times across Free Your Mind. Like most earnest attempts to reimagine the past, it’s an entertaining indulgence.
It's completely separate to the band's previous 'Zonoscope' and 'In Ghost Colours' records. Everything is more hyperactive, euphoria being the absolute goal.
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.
While their venture into psychedelia was a failed experiment, everything about Free Your Mind, from its title to its monotonous songs, is undeniably lazy.
The record is so one-note it makes its predecessor sound like an entire season at the London Philharmonic.
If this album is Cut Copy’s idea of a religious experience, then I’m fine with excommunication—namely, not listening to most of these songs ever again.
Unfortunately, after two very classic albums it was only fairly good or boring ones.
The best associations on this album evoke
In Memory Capsule i meet me in a house of love, but that's not enough for such a band.
Cut Copy takes another crack at making an entrancing, holistic dance record a la In Ghost Colours, but with mixed results. Instead of tracks complementing one another, the fourteen tracks at display here mostly blend into a colourful mush of house-influenced piano stabs and fizzy synths, with the exception of the soft, sensual "Dark Corners & Mountain Tops" that serve as a refreshing stand-out in this rather one-note album. Besides that, we have generic house excursions like ... read more
1 | Intro 0:20 | |
2 | Free Your Mind 4:56 | |
3 | We Are Explorers 4:18 | |
4 | Let Me Show You Love 5:55 | |
5 | (into the desert) 1:28 | |
6 | Footsteps 4:41 | |
7 | In Memory Capsule 4:39 | |
8 | (above the city) 0:31 | |
9 | Dark Corners & Mountain Tops 5:06 | |
10 | Meet Me In A House Of Love 6:08 | |
11 | Take Me Higher 5:51 | |
12 | (the waves) 0:44 | |
13 | Walking In The Sky 3:31 | |
14 | Mantra 2:14 |
#8 | / | Obscure Sound |
#18 | / | Gigwise |
#45 | / | Under the Radar |
#48 | / | FasterLouder |