Commercial Music

About the album

After two albums and an EP without song or record titles, the presence of names on Melbourne duo Fabulous Diamonds’ third album is probably going to be the first thing that people notice. It‘s also the most irrelevant. What really matters is that Commercial Music is Fabulous Diamonds’ most textured, luxurious album yet. Whilst their first record was (according to the band) baby steps and stabs in the dark, and their second album reached for an under-produced liveliness, Commercial Music – titled with no hint of irony – is high-brow, young adult contemporary pop music.

As with their last album, 2010’s Fabulous Diamonds II, the band recorded with Eddy Current Suppression Ring/Total Control guitarist Mikey Young, this time taking over the upstairs room in Melbourne’s John Curtin Hotel for four days in mid 2011. Photographic assistance again comes from the inimitable Karl Scullin. But the deep shimmer of Inverted Vamp introduces a new all-enveloping sound, and later Wandering Eye and Lothario display a newfound ease with canny song construction. Drummer Nisa Venerosa and keyboardist Jarrod Zlatic’s lyrics deal with cynical social observations and bleak character portraits, but over the billowing music they take on a dreamy languor that makes them seem almost harmless. And as always, Fabulous Diamond explore each of their ponderous grooves to its fullest, but now the weight is lifted by nuanced arrangements and seamless digital production. Commercial Music is both deep and feather light, the heaviest of transcendental pop.