Mildlife Automatic

Close your eyes during Melbourne combo Mildlife’s second album and you can almost see it: the swirl of stars unspooling in deep purple space, the shag carpet of Milky Way dust, the giant mirror ball of the moon. Connecting the dots between ’70s fusion, ’90s acid jazz and modern salvage-seekers like Tame Impala and Daft Punk, Automatic is a fun, transportive record, playful enough to avoid feeling heavy (the robo-voiced mantras of “Vapour”, the scat-sung middle section of “Memory Palace”) but genuine enough in its commitment to kick when it wants to (the hard-swung groove of “Downstream”, the Floyd-like spaciness of “Citations”). They play to each other like jazz and to their audience like disco. And no matter how high they fly, the groove remains terra firma.