Have you ever tried to eat a doughnut without licking your lips? For me, at least, it’s impossible. Now here’s an equally unachievable challenge. Try and review A Taste Of, by Belgium dream pop artists Colour Kane, and not include words such as dreamy, soaring, atmospheric, or the oft quoted ‘blissed-out’.
Colour Kane emanate from the flatlands of Northern Belgium. Despite the areas geographical sparseness, there remains a beauty that has inspired artists over countless generations. Their inspiration has something to do with space, acre upon acre of flat, one-dimensional space.
The scarcity of any focal point can ignite the imagination, if you allow it to. There are no mountains, no valleys to paint. So the answer is to explore the space that exists between objects, encouraging you to look upwards beyond the flat and into the sky itself.
We all tend to live in our own flatland existence, sometimes not pausing to look up and see the endless space that exists beyond our understanding. Colour Kane musically encourage us to do exactly that.
It is my belief that this is why the Dutch play such attractive football. They see the pitch for what it is, a flat surface, and explore the possibilities of the space that exists around each movement. This music is a musical embodiment of that theory.
A track such as the wonderful “Seaside Dream” just cries out to be played, lying flat out on a sand dune on the Belgian coast, contemplating the above and beyond.
A Taste Of arrived at my desk following a convoluted journey that saw it being created near Antwerp, released in Perth, Australia, by Hidden Shoal, and sent all the way back to me in Northern France. It seems oddly appropriate that the album should make the journey through such a distance because it has the power to transport you across the landscape on a kind of musical ‘out of body’ trip.
Colour Kane have clearly attracted all the right kinds of attention. None other than Robin Guthrie, of Cocteau Twins fame, who was so impressed that he invited Colour Kane to support him on his Lumiere shows across Belgium.
So, without falling into my own recklessly made trap, let me try and describe what we have on this album. This is musical art set within a dream pop aesthetic that revives any flagging belief in the future of this style of music. Sensual cinematic styling successfully encourages our burnt out imaginations to take five, lie back, and contemplate the clouds.
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