It feels strange to be writing about Lost Valentinos’ debut album considering they were at the forefront of Sydney’s live music resurgence and indie renaissance in the mid-Noughties. It’s odd because unlike their contemporaries such as Faker, Red Riders and The Presets, Lost Valentinos don’t have multiple records under their belt. So why has it taken almost half a decade for the Sydney quartet to release a debut album?

Lost Valentinos represented everything that was simultaneously loved and loathed about the Sydney music scene circa 2005. Then known as The Valentinos, they were a bunch of beautiful people with Ksubi and art-school connections playing nouveau post-punk at Spectrum to a bunch of even more beautiful people who were probably at art school (or at least doing an arts degree) and had just discovered bands like Joy Division, Gang of Four and Television. After early initial success with the single ‘Man With A Gun’ and a self-titled EP, The Valentinos stalled. A weaker follow-up EP (2006’s Damn and Damn Again), line-up changes (drummer Dan Stricker defected to interstate rivals Midnight Juggernauts), the aforementioned name change and an aborted dalliance with dance music via the single '17 Deaths' saw Lost Valentinos struggling to find their place within a quickly-shifting indie music landscape.

It’s a credit to the quartet that debut LP Cities of Gold manages to sound contemporary in the indie zeitgeist, but also genuine and authentic. English producer wunderkind Ewan Pearson helps to incorporate Lost Valentinos’ post-punk beginnings with their obvious dance music fetish, in much the same way he did with The Rapture on Pieces of the People We Love. It’s most emblematic in ‘Serio’, with its percussion bricolage, choral vocals and throbbing synths. “Let the sun rise/Before we say goodbye” is the song’s communal catch-cry. It’s as much Empire of the Sun fantasy as it is the Rapture’s joyful abandonment.

Lyrically, Cities of Gold exists in the epoch of an ecstasy high, when anything is possible. “Let’s leave it all behind,” sings Nik Yiannikas in opener ‘Midnights’, guiding us into the Lost Valentinos’ garden of indie-dance delight. The exact same line is echoed in Cities of Gold’s most ostensibly electro-dance number ‘In The City of Gold’, as its centrifugal, throbbing synthesisers recalls Lost Valentinos’ DJ and remix side project The Knife Machine. They don’t even bother to veil it in metaphor on the insistent dance-punk tune ‘Thief’: “And we get high/And we get love”.

But after all the energy exerted in the first half of the record, Cities of Gold loses steam. What was a hedonistic dancefest becomes an excursion into cerebral and ethereal M83 territory with swirling, atmospheric keyboards and ’80s drum production. (I can just picture those discussions in the studio: “I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more reverb.”) ‘Nightmoves’ is the highlight in the second half of Cities of Gold because of its great pulsing synth-bass line and some deft use of wah, but Yiannikas’ high-pitched warbling highlights a paucity of lyrical inspiration.

Issues of pacing aside, Cities of Gold is by no means a disappointment. While they struggle to rein in all their disparate musical tendencies at times, Lost Valentinos are at their best when they’re making percussive, phantasmagorical indie-dance. There’s plenty of that on Cities of Gold, especially if you’re looking to get high, get love and get lost.

by Dom Alessio