Only fitting to follow a noisy guitar-dominated tune from Dunedin band Bad Sav with another, calmer, guitar-driven sonic storm from Dunedin’s High Dependency Unit/ HDU – “Lull”:
“Lull” is from HDU’s 1998 album “Higher + +” which is one of the classic NZ experimental post-rock albums. It encapsulates perfectly the dreamy astral psychedelia side of the band, usually remembered for their searing futuristic “space blues” soundscapes of walls of firestorm guitar and thunderous bass over tight patterns of crunching drums. It’s wonderful to see the whole glorious catalogue of HDU albums available on Bandcamp for new generations and audiences to discover, including the wonderous “Metamathics” recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
Bit of a nostalgia trip with today’s NZ Music Month offering, released back in the optimistic days of 2018, and yes, it has appeared on PopLib 5 years ago but no rules about repeats here so let’s get our ears syringed with the glorious guitar noise of Bad Sav’s “Pets”:
The sonic storm-front from Bad Sav leader, guitarist and vocalist Hope Robertson’s guitar arrives at the two and a half minute mark, exploding with controlled fury and then continuing to build, forming layer upon layer of gloriously distorted noise as it turns itself into something both hostile and embracing. It’s an utterly beautiful, wrenching song that rewards being played on repeat and loud.
Hearing Bad Sav play this live was always a treat and a thrill. The structural noise filled the room, vibrating every atom as they tore a hole in the fabric of space and time, particularly with the amazing improv destruction ending to “Pets”. The way it ended was different every time, but on a great night (and most Bad Sav performances were great) the song ended like a universe of “Index of Metals”-era Robert Fripp guitar loops disintegrating as it is pulled into a black hole.
Robertson said “Pets” “is a breakup song even though it doesn’t sound like it. It was a “I don’t need to worry about this stuff because I’ve got my pets” kinda thing.”
“When I write a song if I’m so upset or angry or an emotion has gone beyond words, and just write some music and say, “Well, that sums it up”, I don’t think there’s any words necessary. At other times, words are totally necessary; if there’s an actual issue that’s happened or something you wanna discuss with yourself in songwriting then I’ll do that…”
Friday night is alright for jazz. Here’s the exuberant Latin grooves of the opening track “Bones” from the extraordinary album “Spirits” released by NZ jazz ensemble The Circling Sun on UK label Soundway Records last year.
“Spirits” features lush and sometimes Cosmic/ Kosmiche astral jazz elements as well as spiritual/modal jazz and the Latin rhythms here. The album is recommended if you like Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane, or the more contemporary and funky Jazz Is Dead series of albums for that matter, but also very approachable if you are a novice to this particular musical world.
Been playing a lot of jazz this past year since the portal back to that earlier part of my music listening timeline was blown wide open by the Rich Ruth album “I Survived, It’s Over”, so if you dig this check out Rich Ruth too. “Spirits” hits the spot.
If you have yet to catch up with “The Giant’s Lawn” by Wurld Series then please play this song “Resplendent Fortress” and ask yourself what the heck you have been doing with your life to have missed it since it was released six months ago.
Wurld Series’ first album “What’s Growing” back in 2021 was an album of lovable skronky fuzzy pop’n’weirdness that seemed influenced in equal parts by Pavement, Guided by Voices and maybe local legacy of the like of 3Ds and The Clean. “Resplendent Fortress” here is a continuation of that fine lineage of fuzzy melodic rock.
“The Giant’s Lawn” album added a ramshackle pastoral folk-on-magic-mushrooms element with musical arrangements featuring at times saxophone, mellotron and wheezy synths, while also at times folding in something of a Rain Parade/ Paisley Underground psychedelia-via-Ogden’s Nutgone Flake whimsical-but-dark vibe. All that adds up to an album with variety, layers of depth and interest and something you’ll likely play again and again if this kind of musical concoction is your thing.
Wurld Series are Luke Towart, Brian Feary, Ben Woods and Ben Dodd and the album is released on everyone’s favourite Christchurch record label Melted Ice Cream (and also on Meritorio offshore).
I know I bang on here on PopLib about the current/ recent Dunedin underground scene and also how there’s so much essential music existing in the not-on-label twilight music underworld shared via Bandcamp and I’m not going to stop. Drives me wild that only a handful of people appear to be aware of music like Thorn Dells “Silicon Pink” album. Here’s “Orlando” from it:
The Koputai/ Port Chalmers, Ōtepoti/ Dunedin duo Thorn Dells is Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital, Kolya) and Lucinda King (Death And The Maiden, Bad Sav). “Silicon Pink” is a fantasia of dark hybrid electronic pop, each song a shift in time and space, mixing light and darkness, electronic pop and more exploratory sounds.
“Orlando” here is as out of character as everything on the album, its brooding guitar-dominated futurist post-punk somehow channeling some kind of imaginary post-grunge Breeders sonic mutation.
The whole album all feels majestic and epic, the kind of album you would expect to hear on a major independent label (4AD, Mute, etc.) but in the 2020s self-releasing through Bandcamp is where you will find the sound of today’s essential exploratory music underground.
Half Hexagon are a trio from dystopian Auckland. Or maybe a dystopian trio from Auckland. Or maybe just a trio from Auckland who make music that could be a soundtrack to some dystopian thriller in which rebels on analog bicycles lure Ford Ranger-driving zombies into an ambush halfway down Dominion Road. “The Method” is whatever your imagination wants it to be:
Half Hexagon combine the talents of unlikely collaborators Yolanda Fagan (Na Noise, Echo-ohs), Julien Dyne (The Lahaar, The Circling Sun), and James Milne (Lawrence Arabia). The relentless motorik pace of “The Method” sounds almost as if the garage psych-rock of Na Noise has been wired up through synths operated by the descendants of “Space Ritual” era Hawkwind. Love this kind of retro-futuristic electronica untethered to any particular scene or sub-genre. Welcome to The Future.
Wellington/ Pōneke septet Recitals released their first album “Orbit I” towards the end of 2022. It’s one of those debut albums that arrives as a fully-formed work of wonder. I loved it so much I had to buy the LP. Here’s the mostly quiet and dreamlike “The Pip”:
Recitals are Xanthe Brookes (bass, vocals, guitar), Carla Camilleri (synth, vocals), Christian Dimick (guitar, vocals), Josh Finegan (drums), Sam Curtiss (guitar), Tharushi Bowatte (trumpet), and Olivia Wilding (cello).
“The Pip” seems to be about meta interconnectivity – the pip inside the orange and the (possible future) orange inside the pip. Most Recitals songs alternate between a kind of woozy dream-pop blissed-out state and a wild, verging-on-psychedelic rapturous freak out state and “the Pip” takes its time before briefly combusting into euphoric noise-pop cacophany. Those dream-like early stages of the song reminded me of an Auckland collective from 20 years ago called Tokey Tones.
“Orbit I” is a great album, and while Recitals are not Polyphonic Spree, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev or The Besnard Lakes there are elements in their music that I’m pretty sure would also appeal to fans of those bands. So don’t be shy, check “Orbit I” out.
Forty years ago, after the first burst of The Clean uncoiled, the Kilgour brothers recorded a low-key album “Clean Out Of Our Minds” as The Great Unwashed and referenced their hometown in “What You Should Be Now” with the opening lines: “Saw you back in Dunedin/things seems strange there”.
Things are still strange here, and none stranger than Port Chalmers institution Seafog who carry the lop-sided jangle of early Clean/ Great Unwashed in the opening track of their best album yet, “Slow Death”. Here’s “Up The Harbour”:
Seafog are guitarist and lead vocalist Robin Sharma (Jetty), guitarist Nigel Waters, bass guitarist Andrew Barsby and drummer Martyn Sadler. As they expained a while back: “Seafog are a 4 piece that have been around for a while. We play in the garage out Port, sometimes like our lives depend on it.”
“Slow Death” is the band’s fourth album. It’s got all the charms of its predecessors, but this one seems less idiosyncratic and more instantly approachable. The distinctive stream-of-semi-conscious-delerium-fuelled excursion from frontman Robin Sharma (Jetty) are reigned in somewhat and a more reflective tone pervades the album, although he still sometimes sounds like he’s possessed by forces beyond his control.
There’s something here for everyone from loose jangling songs that stand out in the crowd as being from Dunedin, through to a trumpet-led instrumental “Moa” and a whole lot of fuzzed up, Sonic Youth-styled wall-of-guitar noise good times in between.
It’s not a Seafog album unless there’s a song about a song, or a band, or an album. “Slow Death” obliges with “Warm Flows” about listening to Brian Eno: “here come the warm jets again” . For good measure the album closes with the Iggy-esque “Sick”. Can’t get more Dunedin-with-West-Harbour attitude than Seafog.
According to the all-seeing-eye/ hive-mind that is wikipedia “Shoegaze is a subgenre of indie and alternative rock characterized by its ethereal mixture of obscured vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume.” Nice try, particularly if you are describing the heavier MBV/ Swervedriver/ Ride/ Catherine Wheel etc. end. But the “feedback and overwhelming volume” is often missing from the best examples of the genre, like Lush, Slowdive, Pale Saints, Ozean and, well Christchurch, NZ practitioner of the art, T.G. Shand as demonstrated here on “Cinnamon” from last year’s EP of that name.
Perhaps T.G. Shand blurs the line between ‘shoegaze’ and dream-pop in a similar way to Cocteau Twins by creating dream-gaze or gaze-pop. Or maybe it’s just, you know, music and we should just enjoy it and soak in the pools of reverb and chorus guitars and not try to analyze and overthink it too much (sorry). OK. Let’s just do that…
In the most recent period of not posting on PopLib this gem from Jim Nothing was missed. Apologies. It’s another splendid single released ahead of a new album and it’s called “Easter At The RSC”:
“Easter At The RSC” lodges in my senses with a heavy vibration from Christchurch in 1986. That vibration may be from the spellbinding debut EP from the then Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, and specifically a song called “Firetime”. However, this jangling fuzzed up Jim Nothing song swirls in a timeless vortex that includes the guitar tones of The Clean maybe.
“Easter At The RSC” is a song about selling a car. The previous Jim Nothing song “Raleigh Arena” was about the joy of cycling on his clapped out rat-bike, so maybe selling the car is the next logical step in this back to basics progression.
There’s now a third Jim Nothing single up on his Bandcamp (added in April) called “Hourglass” which is about time slipping away and not coming back. Fair to say the next Jim Nothing album is on my “most-anticipated new albums of 2024” list.
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