“Look Alive!” by Jetstream Pony

“Look Alive!” is from “Under The Bridge 2”, a further volume of a compilation reuniting groups and songwriters who had once recorded for cult UK label Sarah Records in the 1990s. Jetstream Pony here link back through vocalist Beth Arzy to the band Aberdeen (from Los Angeles, confusingly) who released two EPs on Sarah Records in 1994.

Jetstream Pony are Beth Arzy, Kerry Boettcher, Shaun Charman, and Hannes Müller. Self-described as post punk and indie-pop but it’s not all the buzz-saw guitars on display here on “Look Alive!” If you check the well-appointed Jetstream Pony Bandcamp site you will find much fine music to explore, with hazy shoegaze guitars and dreampop melodicism represented as well.

“Under the Bridge 2” is a double LP containing 20 new tracks, set for release on 5 April 2024 on Skep Wax Records.  The tracks range from dark chamber pop to shoegaze and indie-pop.  New combinations of familiar names from Sarah Records era bands appear, including The Gentle Spring (a new project by Michael Hiscock of The Field Mice), Vetchinsky Settings (a collaboration between James Hackett of The Orchids and Mark Tranmer of St Christopher), and Mystic Village (which features new songs by Robert Cooksey of The Sea Urchins).

Familiar names are also here – Even As We Speak, The Orchids and Secret Shine – bands whose line-ups have remained mostly unchanged since the 1990s.  While the music on the album is new, and the present and future is more important than the past, the shared history also gives a shared aesthetic and ethos which continues to tap the same vein of independent uplifting pop.

For anyone interested in going to down an Aberdeen (the band) rabbit hole, Aberdeen also appear on the excellent “Three Wishes: Part Time Punks Sessions” album along with 14 Iced Bears, and The June Brides.

“Instant Coffee” by Dumb Things

Aussie battlers Dumb Things are back with a sweet and dark song about coffee. None of that fancy single origin bean hand ground in a ceramic burr grinder for a pour-over coffee stuff. It’s Dumb Things, so this is “Instant Coffee” with a dollop of existential crisis.

Dunno what it is about this Brisbane, Queensland band but they just have a knack of crafting seemingly simple songs about ordinary everyday things and turning them into heart-stopping pop classics.

The Go-Betweens were also from Brisbane 4 decades ago. Like Dumb Things they crafted clever pop songs from comparatively simple ingredients of a voice and two guitars, bass and drums. But their lyrics often had the gravitas of aspiring novelists.

Dumb Things lyrics, for all their quotidian subject matter, are sometimes just as profound. Except here it is instant coffee which is considered with the same existential intensity as a Go-Betweens relationship break-up, and the process and rituals around drinking instant coffee alone doing some heavy metaphorical lifting in the process. Coffee & Cane (sugar) anyone?

Musically “Instant Coffee” develops and blooms as it goes, displaying an increasing musical confidence and ambition in its structure, arrangement of instruments (check those glorious counterpoint guitar melodies) and the under-stated vocal delivery.

Dumb Things are probably sick of being compared to other bands here. But, if it helps sell you on them, there’s also a little bit of the beguiling simplicity of NZ stalwarts The Bats about Dumb Things approach, and even at times Robert Scott’s magical Bats-offshoot Magick Heads.

Anyway, it’s just another bloody lovely song from them. Looking forward to the new album down the line.

“Invocation” by The Fuzzy Robes

Christchurch six-piece progressive psychedelic band The Fuzzy Robes have announced the release of their second album of lysergic liturgic themed psych-rock “Midday Prayers” which opens with “Invocation”:

The Fuzzy Robes first album “Night Prayers” from June 2021 was a similar weirdly unsettling and trippy affair. Part psychedelic, part prog, part ecclesiastical-spiritual. That part I found pretty cult-level creepy and there’s no let up on this introductory song on this second album or the remaining song titles.

Cult creepiness of the theological and liturgical fascination of the lyrics aside, the music is, well… heavenly. Closest comparison for my ears is Canadian Band The Besnard Lakes, which is kind of Beach Boys melodies and harmonies put through a psychedelic effects-washed prog-rock blender.

“Default Parody” by Drahla

Leeds avant-garde post-punk band Drahla are back, with their second album “angeltape” on the way and a first song from the album “Default Parody” shared ahead of the April release.

 It’s been 5 years since “Useless Coordinates” was released, the year before the world, and in particular music/ band/ label plans were up-ended by pandemic etc. Drahla have added guitarist Ewan Barr joining vocalist and guitarist Luciel Brown, bassist Rob Riggs and drummer Mike Ainsley.

The added guitarist adds even more texture and rhythmic complexity to the band’s dark and intense sound, angular shapes stabbed out by percussive guitar chords over driving hi-gain bass and propulsive drums, while Luciel Brown delivers another intriguing sing-speak narrative. Great to have them back.

“Aim Higher” by House of All

The 2023 self-titled debut from House of All – redemption songs by survivors of The Fall – was what we in the trade call “A Grower”. The thrill of two thundering drummers (Paul Hanley and Simon Wolstencroft) and the gravitational pull of those neutron star bass riffs (Steve Hanley) underpinned a collection of exuberant and irreverent songs fronted by (totally) wired guitarist/ poet/ singer/ exhorter-in-chief Martin Bramah that became more and more joyful and memorable the more times they hammered into the listener’s skull. At the time of its release Bramah hinted there was more to come from the group. Here’s the first offering from second album “Continuum”, called “Aim Higher”.

House of All leader Martin Bramah (Blue Orchids, Factory Star) was a founding member and style-creator of The Fall from 1977 to 1979 and the only sacked member (there were lots of those) to rejoin The Fall (for the “Extricate” album 1989-1990) and then be sacked again by Mark E. Smith.

The best way for survivors of The Fall to pay tribute to the late curmudgeon Mark E. Smith is to do something he would disapprove of (House of All), but to do it so well that, were he still alive, he’d be even more enraged about not being part of it.

For reasons best known to Bramah the chorus of “Aim Higher” appropriates the chilling phrase “step we gaily, on we go”, the opening words of Sir Hugh Robertson’s appropriation/ re-writing of John Robert Bannerman’s 1930’s song “Mairi’s Wedding” (also known as the “Lewis Bridal Song”) with his own faux-traditional lyrics. The garbled language of this opening line comes across as something that might be uttered by a deranged Celtic Yoda. To add insult to injury, in 1959 James B. Cosh devised a Scottish Country Dance to the tune, thereby blighting the life of many a child during the 1960s and 1970s bizarrely forced to dance to it and other Scottish Country Dances at school in New Zealand and possibly other parts of the Anglosphere world as some kind of weird colonial cultural conditioning.

Anyway, I digress. Despite the triggering connotations of the phrase, Martin Bramah’s regular exhortations to “aim higher! aim higher!” crack the manic music master’s whip, and the crew of fellow recovering ex-Fall members power their way through another brilliant hard-edged pop tune with expressive storytelling from Bramah. “People thought I was off my head!” he shouts in this song, typical of the chemistry of the infectiously enthusiastic weirdness and mischief of House of All.

For House of All completists there’s a fun live/ re-mix album as well called Bay City Pistols “including the crowd fave Wet Leg / Can cover, “Ur Mum” / “Uphill”, which lasts over 10 minutes”.

“Venturi Effect” by Hex waves

Chairman Jim, the same enigmatic cultural commentator of Garage fanzine fame some decades ago, grumbled in the background of a long distance phone call today about there being too much American stuff on PopLib recently and to get back to NZ stuff. So here’s “Venturi Effect” from his favourite Christchurch sludge monsters Hex Wave:

“Venturi Effect” is from a 2018 cassette from Hex Waves called “Canine Rising” on Melted Ice Cream (of course). I can see why Chairman Jim likes this. It’s from the same dark corner of Christchurch as past favourites like The Gordons, Max Block and The Terminals, but with volume and effects turned up way past 11.

“Venturi Effect” sounds like the Gordons or Bailter Space recorded live in a huge concrete basement with the volume of everything cranked way beyond the capacity of the recording machine to cope with the sound pressure levels.

As they explain on their Bandcamp page: “Recorded (very) live in 2016 at The Hex Waves bandroom in Waltham, Chch. Recorded straight to 1/4-inch tape on a TEAC A-3340S found in a pile of rubbish outside the Psychology Department at the University of Canterbury.”

The Hex Waves are/were/ have been/ may still be drummer Nadine Luscombe (that squelchy splat sound), guitarist/ vocalist Luke Wood (those distorted melodic sounds), and bassist Jamie Stratton (that distorted bassy sound). It’s kind of lo-fi surf rock (hints of The Cramps) and primitive sludge metal riffing, a combination that works surprisingly well. The effect-overloaded guitar freak-outs in the songs are very psychedelic. This would be amazing to hear live but the next best thing would be playing this very loud and losing your mind and your hearing.

“A Ghost” by Shana Cleveland

Staying Stateside and also staying with acoustic guitars, another favourite album of 2023 (and one actually released in 2023) has been Shana Cleveland’s “Manzanita”. The opening song of this “supernatural love album set in the California wilderness” is “A Ghost”:

Cleveland is songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer, and also a member of Californian psychedelic surf rock band La Luz.

“Manzanita” may be a ‘love album’ but it’s a bit dark and weird, the songs populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. It’s California, West Coast USA psychedelic back-country folk music of no fixed time or place, with a hint of Carny freak-show mixed in, by virtue of the lyrics and also the musical instrumentation and arrangements.

“Manzanita” is another album I kept coming back to throughout the year. A slow burner initially but you soon realise this is a dreamlike world of woozy enticing songs and sounds you want to revisit over and over again.

“The Grand Old Trout” by Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker

A bit of a diversion now off the path of what’s been mostly jangling lo-fi DIY Australasian guitar pop over the past few weeks, into my favourite acoustic guitar album of 2023. OK, so “SpiderBeetleBee” by Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker was released in 2017 well before the world went crazy. Somehow it only came to my attention this year, and I’m glad it did. It’s extraordinarily good, as good as anything from the masters like Renbourn, Jansch etc.

There’s only one song shared on the Drag City Records Bandcamp page for the album “The Grand Old Trout” but it’s as good a calling card for the album as any.

Bill MacKay is a Chicago based guitarist-composer-improviser. Ryley Walker was also Chicago based at the time I think but now New York based. He is also a guitarist-composer-improviser with a broad catalogue of exploratory folk-pop-jazz-prog etc albums (MacKay appears on some – check the recent “Course in Fables”). The pair have also released an earlier live album together “Land of Plenty”.  

“SpiderBeetleBee” is described as “Shared joy and acoustics in rambling conversation, as two friends travel the continents via high-road, short-cut and their own paths, yet untravelled. Picking in the tradition, Walker and MacKay summon drafts of slide blues, baroque dance, percolating latin and deep-focus space to push them on their way beyond the sunrise.” I don’t need to write anything more. If you like “The Grand Old Trout” here you’ll love the whole album.

Just found another Bandcamp page for the album which shares another quite different track, “I Heard Them Singing” which is my favourite on the album, so bonus music time. Enjoy.

“Point of View” by Soft Covers

Soft Covers were formed in Meanjin/Brisbane, and now based in Naarm/Melbourne where they play what they call “soft pop”. It’s gentle strummed Australian DIY guitar pop with a little bit of cheap & cheerful keyboard adornment. Soft songs, delivered in a refreshingly low-key, simple style. Sometimes – most times – that’s all we need. The best songs are at the start of the album (“Every Week”) and at the end where “Point of View” here can be found:

Soft Covers are Laura, James and Dan (can’t find any surnames) and have links to Dumb Things. There’s a James in Dumb Things, so I’m guessing James is the link. He certainly sounds like the singer from Dumb Things when he sings in Soft Covers. I also noted Dumb Thing/ Renovators Delight Madeleine Keinonen playing keyboards in a photo from a live show so there’s another connection. And the album was recorded by the same guy – Cam Smith – who recorded Renovators Delight and Dumb Things albums. So make of all that what you will. But it does give a really good idea of where in the Australian music universe Soft Covers sit.

“Imitation of War” by Itasca

“Imitation of War” is the first song shared ahead of the release early in 2024 of a new album of the same name by Itasca – songwriter and guitarist Kayla Cohen with regular collaborator Daniel Swire (drums) and Wand members Evan Backer (bass), Evan Burrows (drums) and recorded/ mixed by Wand’s Robbie Cody. It’s a bit different from the previous two Itasca albums of acoustic guitar desert folk.

For Itasca’s “Imitations of War” Cohen has plugged in her 1971 Gibson SG-100, cranked up the reverb and chorus, and taken a heavier path that’s equal parts laid-back and loose psychedelic desert rock and delicately crafted medieval folk stylings. It’s an unlikely but altogether glorious combination.

It’s not just the sound of the guitars here but something about the ornate delicate structure of the song and the unexpected chord changes, and especially the high-flying instrumental section from the 2 minute 45 mark , that bring to mind the delicate guitar artistry of both Maurice Deebank (Felt) and Vini Reilly (The Durutti Column).