Totally Mild

Melbourne’s Totally Mild write songs that are lush and luxurious, polished to sparkle. Her, the band’s highly-anticipated sophomore album, is full of narrative heart, but with a Stepford sheen. Teasing out a thematic tension between the loving and the lacklustre, the domestic and the deluxe, vocalist/guitarist and songwriter Elizabeth Mitchell’s voice is crystal clear. It weaves through her band’s lyrical, immaculately considered arrangements with a dexterity that speaks volumes of the band’s capacity to let melodies grow, breathe, and take shape.

Beginning as memos, fragments, and demos, Mitchell develops the songs alongside Zachary Schneider (guitar), Lehmann Smith (bass), and Ashley Bundang (drums). Producer James Cecil (Architecture in Helsinki, Super Melody), whose sense for shiny pop production, helped the band track the album live in-studio over a day and a half.

There is a push and pull in the arrangements on Her that signals a truly deft sense of melody and structure; Mitchell cites Schneider’s sense of melody, Bundang’s lyrical playing, and Smith’s affinity for restraint as key in each song. There is never a sense on Her that a part or a melody was added lightly: the songs morph and meander with a kind of breathing life, afforded to them through the band’s musical communication.

Her is undoubtedly a collection of songs that, while diverse and musically complex, cherry-pick from decades of the best of pop music. However, beneath the sparkling surface of each song, there is often a seed of doubt, a slight sense of melancholy. Even an unbridled love song like “Pearl”, which declares “I thought that I would want so many in my lifetime/But now the only one is you”, eulogises the first moments of falling in love: “I will never have you again/Not in the same way/Not with a new face”. No emotion on Her is singular.

Mitchell says of the album’s title that many of the songs meditate on the female experience: of love, of domesticity, of surveillance, of bliss, and of anxiety. The portrait of Mitchell’s mother that hangs in the corner of the album’s cover signals the overarching sense of the feminine that hovers over Her. Mitchell notes that while the second-person address on the record often functions to address a lover or a friend, sometimes the ‘you’ she addresses is an aspirational self: they’re subtle, reflexive bids for self-empowerment.

Mood rises and falls expertly on Her: “Working Like A Crow”, which was originally written for a children’s choir (whose voices are heard in the distance on the track), is simple in its self-sufficiency and assertiveness. It’s followed by “From One Another”, a eulogy for a toxic relationship, where Mitchell sings “Sigh of relief, no grief/But you wonder which of you will end up winning.” The ebb and flow of the album is exemplified by its switch from Side A to Side B: Mitchell’s love for piano balladry is showcased on Side A closer “Lucky Stars”, while side B jerks the listener awake and makes a case for staying home with “Today Tonight”.

On Her, Totally Mild are in dialogue with their debut, the critically acclaimed Down Time. Down Time very much mused on what it meant to be a young person who found solace in ill-advised parties and people, while Her is a wiser record. Album closer Down Together is about leaving those things behind, and it’s no coincidence that in the song’s refrain — “You can only get down together”— “get down” refers to both a collective excess and a collective sadness. Although Her has its moments of melancholy, it’s a reflective, meditative sadness that replaces Down Time’s lethargy. On Her, Totally Mild move through light and shade with smoky, silky finesse.