Cam Muncey - Cam Muncey And The Delusions Of Grandeur Cam Muncey

You may think that you know what a solo record by a member of the multi-million-selling Australian rock’n’roll band Jet is going to sound like, but you do not. That’s because you are yet to press play on Cam Muncey & the Delusions of Grandeur the brilliant new album by Jet guitarist and co-founder Cam Muncey. A world removed from the up and at ‘em crunching guitar anthems of his day job, Muncey’s debut album is a daring and adventurous trip into the wild, one that explores a sonic landscape he has left untouched in his work with the band he formed with brothers Nic and Chris Cester in 2001. 
 
And yet it was the reformation of the group back in 2017 that convinced him to do it. It was then that Jet embarked on a support tour with Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band that took in some of Australia’s biggest stadiums. 
 
Up until that point, the 2010s had been a creatively subdued time for the guitarist and vocalist, a time where Muncey slowly tried to make sense of the heady, intoxicating success of the 2000s, a decade in which Jet experienced meteoric, global success and gave the world a new attitude-heavy rock’n’roll group chocka with sizzling, singalong anthems to fall in love with.

By the time Covid rolled around, Muncey had a fire in his belly. Some artists couldn’t get in the groove during the pandemic, happy to deal with the doom and gloom by bingeing box sets like the rest of us, but he got to grips with first GarageBand and then Logic and a vision for something wholly his own slowly came into view. 
 
“I got really bloody-minded about it,” he remembers. “I’d shut myself in the room for many hours, very late at night through to three or four in the morning. It was fantastic.”
With a clear idea of the sounds he was after, the songs soon followed. Muncey went into the studio with award-winning Australian producer Jan Skubiszewski with the intent of recording two tracks, the driving, widescreen rocker Already Gone and the lilting country-soul of Don’t Fade On Me, but found the songs were pouring out of him.
 
Working with Skubiszewski and roping Jet bandmates Mark Wilson (bass) and Peter Marin (drums) into the sessions, a record began to take shape. “It was a case of, ‘I’ve got this one… and this one, and this other one, and then book more studio time.” 
 
By the end, the 12 songs that make up Cam Muncey & the Delusions of Grandeur were laid down over 30 days and Muncey threw himself into the role of ringleader. “It was great being the chef, the leader,” he says. “It took a lot more energy. Your brain is wide open, it takes a lot of concentration and openness.”
 
It has resulted in an expansive and mellow solo debut, a record that uses its reference points as loose directions on the way to something entirely of its own. Guided by Muncey’s warm, melodious vocals, it’s an album that pulls you in and takes you on a journey. On the way, you’ll pass by hazy, psychedelic Americana (No Rock’n’Roll Star, in which the singer questions his rock star credentials), minor-chord splendour (stirring torch song I’ve Been Low), kaleidoscopic psychedelic-rock grooves (the Tame Impala-ish Breathing Again and the shimmering, retro-futuristic pop of Arrhythmia) and hypnotic, space-y ballads (Daylight, Dark Mind, which sees Muncey revisiting the nocturnal-heavy routines of life in his twenties, and the gently stirring I Am Playing With Your Heart).
 
Elsewhere, Take A Chance, in which Muncey transplants himself back to his north London neighbourhood during the 2011 London riots, is a swirling, soulful piano-pop gem whilst Quarantine is a woozy, acoustic number with a sideways look back on crazy Covid times. Melbourne had a particularly heavy lockdown. “I remember at the beginning, they were saying, ‘It’s in the grass!’” he says, incredulously. “I was worried if I went out, like, ‘How long before the Covid has left the grass? Is it still on the grass?’. They had us washing our groceries!’”
 
If there’s a song that sums up the way Cam Muncey & the Delusions of Grandeur pulls you in and makes you want to stay, it’s Friendly, a breezy, 80s pop number that has a pleasing lightness of touch and easy-come-easy-go feel about it before you realise its chorus has been lodged in your head for a week.