With the announcement of a new album on the back of 2010’s Hooray! For Happiness, The Last Dinosaur put out preview track, Grow, as a free download through SoundCloud back in April 2012. Sadly, the song is no longer free to download, but you can take a listen to it in the YouTube video below.
The track is a mellow reintroduction to the band, with warm brushed drums and chilled guitar melodies. It’s a stripped back indie-pop slow burn with a bitter sweet air and winsome gaze that wins you over quite well.
There’s an element of Shins meets The Coral on the little gem of a song. It does a solid job of holding out the gaps in between the notes and layers in points of interest, like the rising string interlude in the mid section.
The video to the track is pretty cool too, especially the slow motion on the first hoola-hoop girl. Honestly, there’s something infinitely skillful in being able to twirl three hoops at the same time like that. It’s like being able to catch more than 20 beer mats in a flip contest in a pub or doing more than a hundred keepy uppies with an Italia ’90 Coca-Cola mini ball.
It kind of reminds you of the awe and wonder you had as a child for the circus, as well as showing the sheer skill involved in everything from tightrope walking to diabolos tricks.
The Last Dinosaur are made up of Jamie Cameron and Luke Hayden with Rachel Lanskey on viola. At the time when Grow was being released as a free download, the band was also putting the finishing touches on their 2nd album, The Nothing, and the expectation was that it would be coming out later this year. However, as of March 2015 the album still hasn’t seen the light of day, although the band do appear to still be active.
The last few new items on their website refer to the album still being forthcoming, so it’s entirely possible that this will be the year of their second album release. There’s not much in the way of new music on there though so it might be a little while before we see a studio album, but we’ll see if it pans out in 2015. The confusing part, though, is that there’s an Australian band called Last Dinosaur, but you should be able to spot the difference between the two beasts as the Aussies are indie-rock, where the British band is all indie pop.
