Our track for Day 10 of New Zealand Music Month is a Psychedelic Sunday offering from from Auckland musicianKraus. Here’s “An Arrow in the Haunch”:
Pat Kraus has been making music for 18 years without much fuss or fanfare, but attracting an international audience for his eclectic and individual style of composition and recording.
There’s a kind of DIY op-shop charm about much of the Kraus music universe but “An Arrow in the Haunch” is masterful psychedelic music, meshing some Middle Eastern (?) scales on fuzzy guitar with pounding drums and occasional visits by slightly incongruous distorted budget keyboards.
The guitars here manage to convey a sense of the danger of early Velvet Undergound (eg: the guitar on “Run, Run, Run”) at the same time as sounding vaguely exotic, like you’ve stumbled into a Turkish cafe during a jam session. It’s not a million miles from the style of psych-rock created by Dungen or Kikagaku Moyo and yet it’s not really even from the same planet. Listenable, interesting, and odd.
Pop Lib 