They streak across the clouded pop sky like a comet from deep space. And yet this stone lies here, fitting both awkwardly and naturally into the landscape, as though it had always belonged. Remember them? The dream-struck outsiders who, since 1996, could never quite stop making music? Kerrie Bolton, Bart Cummings and Andrew Withycombe are Hydroplane — and after an unexpected twenty-four years, the trio return with A Place in My Head Is All I Have to Claim, an ode to dreaming, a quiet shimmer in the vast night sky of indie pop.
Their gift for poetic song titles is intact. Whether it’s the »Loneliest Astronaut« in the »Valley of Sorrows« or »Houdini’s Plane« en route »to the Lighthouse«, each piece becomes a musical Polaroid, gradually resolving its blurred contours into the present. Somehow, Hydroplane’s music will never lose its enchanted glow.
As an album that feels like a companion to their self-titled 1997 release — as if no time had passed — A Place in My Head Is All I Have to Claim shows the trio’s rare gift: to bridge time and space effortlessly, whether through dimensional detours or through their enduring refusal to stop dreaming. Perhaps that is their magic — the gentle insistence on a world that refuses to wake fully. The rest, as the album title says, speaks for itself.
