Album Review: Sunbeam Sound Machine - Goodness Gracious

Goodness Gracious sees Melbourne songwriter Nick Sowersby retreating to his studio in solo mode after touring with a five-piece on the back of his debut, Wonderer. His second long-player plants a foot firmly in the chillwave camp, the lo-fi movement whose wave broke nearly a decade ago, but whose torchbearers still noodle away in garages here and there.

The record is a drone from front to back, with woozy, overlapping sounds lazily swarming together to invade your headspace, each element repeating ad infinitum until the song simply gives up.

Sowersby has made a very pretty album, but one without any real, discerning features beyond the familiar accoutrements of the genre. Silent Era introduces some great Brian Wilson-esque harmonising, and its clarity is refreshing, but the remainder is a weed-clouded shrug. Goodness Gracious feels like an extended exploratory bedroom project whose status as an actual album was merely an afterthought.

There’s not much to really engage with, no visceral thrills or intellectual pings of excitement. For stronger examples of the sound, look to early career Washed Out, who did this so much better, as did Small Black and Memory Tapes.