Album: Cloud Control, Bliss Release (Infectious Music)

Do we care that Cloud Control recently won the Australian equivalent of the Mercury Prize?

Does the fact that they recorded this, their debut album, between home in the Blue Mountains and Sydney's red-light district give us any hint of the music therein. Not really and not at all. Harsh but fair.

What's easier to involve ourselves with is the music itself: breezy, poppy pschedelia-light that bounces around from the folk of Fairport or the Fleet Foxes to the more obvious reference point of Jefferson Airplane (co-lead vocalist Heidi Lenffer seems hard-wired towards the sort of ghostly harmonies perfected by Grace Slick).

There are standouts aplenty and, as song rolls seamlessly into song, you can almost forgive the misjudgement of the album's one false step: the high-life-like "This is What I Said". By any standards, special. By Aussie pop standards, extraordinary.