- I’m guilty of not knowing how I feel about Oliver Tank. When I reviewed Tank’s 2011 EP, Dreams, full of slow and serene white-boy r’n’b, drowned in reverberating atmosphere, I boldly prognosticated that the tall, stubbly and mysterious heartbreaker would undoubtedly collect and wreck the blood muscles of a wider audience sometime very soon. It kinda looks like I was right, but, somewhere between then and the imminent release of his new EP for Create/Control, Slow Motion Music, I stopped believing it could happen...and also completely forgot I felt that way in the first place.

I can actually pinpoint the exact moment: 2012, Bigsound Live, his live set in front of the collected industry vultures seemed to disintegrate in slow motion. His collage of beats and live instrumentation persistently refused to pull into formation, his songs becoming a misery of unrealised ambition. At the same time, with the ever-diminishing halflife for genres, that slow and sensual new chapter for r’n’b which had one of its first and greatest moments in The Weeknd’s House Of Balloons began to seem like last week’s tired hype. I just assumed that OT was done.

Not so! Forget Chet Faker and who are Collarbones? Oliver Tank is the new name in lights, signed to Create/Control, collaborating with Ta-Ku and supporting Lana Del Rey. All the buzz had me wondering like crazy exactly what Oliver Tank’s new EP sounds like. You can hear his old sound, leaking in at the edges of opening cut Stay. I mean, the strings might sound like they’ve been borrowed from the CBS Radio Orchestra, but regular collaborator Fawn Myers still has that untutored, Aussie, DIY vocal sound, both experimental and twee at the same time. It’s a little weird, with the slick production sound you might be expecting Rihanna instead.

The basis of Tank’s sound is, under the sheen, still the same too: slow, slightly wonky beats echo massively. Snatches of string, synth and guitar support the angelic vocal strains. Ta-Ku’s newer school friskiness brings the rather literally titled Different Speed up a couple of gears and into 2013. It’s almost like Tank is talking directly to Ta-Ku when he seems to borrow awkwardly from Paul Simon: “Slow down world / You move too fast for me.” Still the end result works.

Tank was one of the first guys I heard, especially in Australia, to try and use autotune, tastefully, and he brings that back here in a few places, notably on the opening of solo track, Home, which also features an uncharacteristically fast beat playing off the strings and a really powerfully droning synth bass. The bass line really works and the track is one of the best on the EP.

This EP is like Oliver Tank’s career: a weird meeting of the bedroom artist I remember with a big screen treatment that I have a hard time reconciling. This disjunction is so strong that it threatens to mar my enjoyment. Strange, when I’ve nearly always liked what he’s done. I really want to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he is what the press releases say he is and what I always used to think he was going to be too.

- Chris Cobcroft.