We are delighted to premiere the new single ‘The World’s A Room’ from Sydney’s brilliant Restless Leg, ahead of the release of their album ‘Dream Buffet’ in June.
Restless Leg cement themselves in the pantheon of antipodean jangle indie rock with this glorious single. It has a classical guitar-based sparkle with a shimmer and verve that works antithetically with the air of melancholy infused in the vocals and the call and response chorus.
There is that same melodic strength coupled with a sense of vulnerability and innocence found in the sound of Dunedin in the eighties and nineties (think The Bats and The Chills), but this is no tribute or pastiche. Restless Leg have carved out their own niche and created something that weaves its own cloth with an indelible thread of pure gold.
The lockdown era that was 2020 has fueled its own epidemic of isolationism writing with rampant and viral symptoms of creativity. In its fey and delicate way, Restless Leg have exquisitely captured the sudden reduction of our horizons to four constraining walls while the band’s imagination has soared unbounded.
Singer/songwriter Ben Chamie says of the track:
This was the last song written for Dream Buffet, at the height of the COVID-lockdown in Sydney in 2020. It was probably around the same time that D.C. Cross released his record of classical guitar compositions (Terabithian) of which he said ‘were not at all concerned with the current social state [i.e. the pandemic]. Total escapism through music’. In stark contrast ‘The World’s A Room’ stares directly into the time-bending tic-toc of lockdown and invites you to dance, by yourself, to some Flying Nun compilation tape you dug out from the early-1990s. It kinda comes at the same problem, but from a different angle.
The lyrics beautifully and poetically capture the sense of lockdown disconnect caused by the strange year that 2020 was:
Turns out all the world’s a room
I walked for miles in my room
I climbed a mountain, climbed a stair
I reached the peak I’d gone nowhere
In the very same moment
The crystalline guitars that create a mesmerising circular phrasing and the driving powerful rhythm section provides forward motion underneath the vocals, with the backing vocals launching the song into space, adding depth and pathos.
‘The World’s A Room’ is available though the link below and through all the usual download/streaming sites from 27 April 2021. It follows the release of the single ‘The Wheel It Turns’ earlier this year, reviewed by Backseat Mafia. On the basis of these two sparkling delights, the release of the new album ‘Dream Buffet’ on 11 June 2021 cannot come too soon.
Feature Photograph: Joshua Morris Photography
