There is a strange sense of distance running through Reetoxa’s Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars), as though these songs are reaching backward into memory and outward into something harder to name. A coastal town, a dream, a voice, an orchestra, a moment of crisis: the EP gathers these fragments and turns them into a surprisingly luminous 14 minutes.
The four-track project finds Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Jason Mckee working somewhere between ’90s rock, alternative pop-rock and cinematic orchestration. But genre is perhaps less revealing here than the emotional world of the songs. Mckee draws primarily from lived experience, allowing difficult and deeply personal moments to become the raw material for songwriting.
“Akaroa” is where that sense of mystery first takes hold. The song originated in a vivid dream during an exceptionally difficult period, when Mckee encountered the word “Akaroa” despite having never heard of the New Zealand coastal town. The melody that followed was eventually lost, only to return years later when he unexpectedly found himself in Akaroa. He describes experiencing an inexplicable presence there before completing the song that same night.
That story inevitably colours the listening experience. “Akaroa” carries a reflective, almost dreamlike quality, its atmosphere leaving space for uncertainty and interpretation. Rather than feeling like a song simply about a place, it becomes a meditation on memory and the strange routes through which creativity sometimes returns to us.
“Erica And The Stars” moves in a different direction, transforming an intensely difficult period into something considerably more expansive. Written during a severe personal crisis, the song became a means of escape and eventually a source of hope. Its most striking element is the full Budapest Orchestra, performing an arrangement Mckee had first imagined internally.
Here, the EP’s intimate songwriting suddenly meets grandeur. The orchestration gives the track a cinematic scale, but the vulnerability behind it remains audible. There is something particularly moving about that transition; from an intensely internal experience to a fully realised ensemble performance.
The production, recorded at The Avenue Recording Studio in Cheltenham with orchestral sessions in Budapest, brings together an accomplished group of collaborators, including producer Simon Moro and musicians connected to Men at Work, Jet, Robbie Williams and The Voice Australia. Yet the musicianship never feels like the point in itself. It serves the emotional architecture of the songs.
Reetoxa’s Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars) is less about darkness than transformation. “Akaroa” looks toward memory; “Erica And The Stars” reaches beyond it. One searches the past for something that disappeared. The other looks upward, imagining somewhere else to go.
And somewhere between the two, Reetoxa finds a space where memory can become music, and survival can become something luminous..
