Surprise Chef - Daylight Savings (2020 Mr Bongo Vinyl LP)

Surprise Chef - Daylight Savings | Vinyl LP - 2020 Mr Bongo (MRBLP208, Optimal Media GmbH)

• Surprise Chef's second album, recorded over a spring weekend in 2019
• Ten original compositions written collectively by the whole band, drawing on 1970s cinematic soul and jazz-funk production in the tradition of David Axelrod, Alain Goraguer and Melbourne contemporaries Karate Boogaloo and The Putbacks
• An Australian band on an international label — one of the few Melbourne jazz-funk groups to have broken through to a significant international audience, with this album appearing on numerous year-end lists for 2020
  

Surprise Chef are a Melbourne band operating from their own studio in Coburg's inner north, which they call the College of Knowledge. Their debut All News Is Good News (2019) was originally released on their own College of Knowledge Records before Mr Bongo picked it up for international distribution. Daylight Savings followed in October 2020, also on Mr Bongo. The record was made over a single spring weekend in 2019, the same weekend Victoria's daylight saving period began. Henry Jenkins engineered using analogue recording techniques in the band's own space, then mixed at Plug Seven Studios in Collingwood.

The influences they name are specific: David Axelrod's orchestral soul productions, the French cinematic composer Alain Goraguer, El Michels Affair's approach to vintage funk reconstruction, and the Melbourne bands Karate Boogaloo and The Putbacks. What the record sounds like in practice is instrumental jazz-funk with a strong emphasis on rhythm section interplay — Jethro Curtin on keyboards and vibraphone, Lachlan Stuckey on guitar, Carl Lindeberg on bass, Andrew Congues on drums, and a three-person percussion section in Hudson Whitlock, Lucky Pereira and Joe Orton, who also plays slide guitar. The ten tracks move between groove-focused pieces and more melodically developed cues, with the vibraphone giving several tracks a particularly warm, vintage quality. This is a Melbourne band building an international reputation from a DIY setup in a house in Coburg — and the record sounds considerably larger than that suggests.