Album Review: Parcels - Parcels

Think about it. If you're roasting in your beachwear, the last thing you need in a summer anthem is heavy kick drums and club energy. You want music that's like a gentle sea breeze, refreshing the parts that other bands can’t reach. Enter the leisurely shimmer-funk of Parcels.

Everything about Parcels seems contradictory. Barely out of their teens, their understated yacht-rock softly harks back to a genre that ended before they were even born. Next, they relocated from Byron Bay to Berlin, a landlocked city steeped in Teutonic techno. Their debut is then released in the Northern Hemisphere during autumn and omits their Daft Punk collaboration Overnight, although it’s no great loss as it would hardly stand out among these songs. Foremost, Lightenup is a tremendous, instant mellow buzz with a breezy flute solo on top. Elsewhere, the extended instrumental Everyroad majestically builds and effortlessly lifts itself into the disco zephyr-sphere like some kind of luxury orgasm, before the almost hypnopompic Closetowhy, returns the listener to a white-walled villa bedroom overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

It'd be tempting to finish with some bottom drawer journalistic platitude like "Parcels really deliver this time" – and it looks like I just did.