Words by Elvis Thirlwell
The waves ride high; seabirds bleat and breakers tumble; the golden sands and crumpled-up beer cans bask in the iridescence of sundown. There’s a gang of spliff-toting, sun-lounging ‘purveyors of chill’ grooving by the shore. It’s Majak Door. Their whimsical, lovelorn melodies coast through the salted skies; surf guitars ripple like skimming stones. There’s an unshakeable positivity in the air. The very atoms around them vibrate with the halcyon dreams and upheavals of youth.
Veiled in such fantasies, this upcoming Melbourne quartet float a cool-ass baker’s dozen of honey-smooched jangle-psych into our pleasure-centres with the release of their eponymous debut album. Devout attendees to the Mac Demarco church of relaxation advocation – the blissed out One Thing At Time is varnished in analogue warmth redolent only of the almighty Mac – their laid-back slackerisms recall Holy Wave with its near-constant reverb-backwash, or the Allah-Las with its refined, minimalist instincts.
Uniformly dulcet and mellow throughout, the album subtly wends its way through various identities – slingshot bottleneck-slides on The Man toast Country & Western; there’s the intimate acoustic caress on token ballad My Nostalgia; Everybody Wants You tempts us with – *gasp* – a chant-along pop-fringing chorus that flirts with the right side of cheese. There’s even a clutch of tracks near the record’s end that deliciously broach darker territories – Headspin rocks true to its name with mind-manifesting swirls of candy-coloured discord, while They Know We Know channels a Rowland S Howard broodiness to charge shivers up one’s spine in a guitar-soaked haze.
As on any fun-loving Babe Rainbow LP, Majak Door is the sound of bros having heart-felt fun with bros. There’s not a singular grain of downcast energy to be found here in this world of boundless pleasantry, expressly crafted, just for us.
hardofhearingmagazine.com 
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