Ocean Floor is the recording project of Harley Cooper, a 23-year-old from Melbourne in Australia. Old Haunts is his debut long player and is an exercise in DIY bedroom pop, recorded in his “cramped” bedroom with “cheap and often temperamental” equipment in mostly single takes, with minimal edits made with reverb and mixing. The result is an album that is at once delicately pretty and intensely heartfelt. As Cooper says in the blurb:
“I chased intimacy and simplicity above perfection and hopefully the songs are, at the very least, honest because of this”
Cooper lists Mount Eerie, Grouper and Bon Iver amongst his influences, and this make total sense once you dig in to the album. ‘Nova’ begins with ambient noise, the bird calls and lazy suburban rumble of traffic, before we get our first taste of Ocean Floor’s acoustic guitar arrangements. The atmosphere is kind of sad but in a lonely sunny afternoon sort of way. ‘Blinding Light’ is a little bleaker, with guitars that would be at home on a Psalmships record, while ‘For Someone Else’ pairs breathy vocals and negative space to create a languidly melodious track. ‘Feathers and Leaves’ is an almost instrumental track which is brighter and more peppy than those prior, fusing folk with something a little more poppy, with little yelpy wooos and la las acting like instruments of their own, reminiscent of Lord Huron.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=580507133 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=212727562]
‘Girl From the States’ is about just that, a love letter to an American girl, while ‘If You Will’ is short and relatively simple but somehow luminous, the guitars twinkling and shining as they get swept up in the pretty melody. ‘Looking at the Sun’ sounds a little like an Elliott Smith song backed with synths like those Strand of Oaks used on earlier albums, and ‘Dusk’ is another instrumental, this one clanging and echoey and vaguely oppressive, like a barely remembered bad dream. The final track is a cover of Daniel Johnstone’s ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’, which ends the album on a heartwarmingly positive note. It’s nice that an album which promises to approach the pains of young adulthood and the failures of relationships ends on a song which (to me at least – I realise people have different interpretations of this song) is as reassuring as they come.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=580507133 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2800203677]
Old Haunts is available now on a pay-what-you-want basis via the Ocean Floor Bandcamp page.