“Raise Your Skinny Fist” by Seafog

Seafog above Port Chalmers

“When you’re stuck inside the song/ and the nights are so long”

Songs about songs, about listening to songs, about living with songs, about living in songs? Here’s one, straight from Dunedin’s underground. So “Raise Your Skinny Fist” to the skies with Seafog.

“been listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor/ and this is what it sounds like when you’re living with me”

It’s a great song, lyrics and title referencing GY!BE’s “Lift your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven” album, and written to celebrate the birth of songwriter and guitarist Robin Sharma’s daughter into this world, and into his home of uneasy-listening music.

As the lyrics of “Raise Your Skinny Fist” indicate, Sharma draws his influences from the disturbed alternative sounds of the 1990’s from the likes of G!YBE, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Slint, Silver Jews and many others.

But the band and the voice, guitars and recording are also the sound of, and a direct link to, the darker, noisier late 1990s to early 2000s decade of Dunedin music that is largely unknown/ forgotten beyond Dunedin memories.

Seafog descended from fine Dunedin band Jetty who released their one great album – “Soundtrack For Modern Heartbreak” – in 1998 (subsequently re-released on Powertool Records in 2008).

Seafog play an unadorned guitar noise with heart-on-sleeve, stream-of-consciousness lyrics; a search for meaning, a search for escape. The album is packed full of this yeasty, prickly, characterful guitar music.

“Raise Your Skinny Fist” is released on Zelle Records on 1 May in a limited edition of 300 LPs.