Richard In Your Mind

Whether by design or sheer coincidence it’s unclear, but the support acts tonight - Ergo B Bag, Bedroom Philosopher and to a lesser extent Bluejuice - are so enmeshed in gimmickry that even a band like Richard In Your Mind, who are rapidly building a reputation in Sydney for their space cake-affected psychadelica, seem somewhat sage when they take the stage tonight.

Mercifully, that impression is blown away almost immediately. No one has taken them to task for so blatantly referencing the Flaming Lips, both sonically and, to varying degrees, with their stage presence, and it’s likely they’ll continue to get away with it. The band claim that time suspends at a Richard in Your Mind concert, but what the band does more effectively is suspend your critical faculties. Richard Cartwright’s eccentric demeanour, his quaint banter, his lyrics, and the joyous absurdity of the band’s pop songs are overwhelmingly effective.

Charisma is almost certainly the main driving force here, and time will judge whether these songs translate successfully onto record. They seem to have stripped back a little of their former absurdity – there’s no sign of the saxophone and only a short, token wielding of the megaphone tonight – but the songs sound better. Indeed, when they “run out of songs” at the end of their set, it really does feel like time has stopped for a while. If only we could speed it up a bit, and have this band’s debut album already.

by Shaun Prescott