Alan Haig is one of the names associated with a myriad of Dunedin bands past and present as drummer (The Chills and Snapper mostly) and keyboard player (David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights and Jay Clarkson and The Containers mostly). This glorious instrumental looks to be his first ‘solo’ release on Bandcamp, recorded with members of The Containers.
“Underneath” recalls some of the widescreen grandeur of a Heavy Eights tune and the uplifting swell, rush and rawness fits the New Zealand landscape. Great driving music therefore.
Alan’s piano & Vox organ is accompanied here by bassist Tenzin Mullin, drummer Mike Dooley (Toy Love), and guitarist Jay Clarkson (The Expendables).
We’ve all made it to the end of May, a month once called “New Zealand Music Month” which implies there was some sort of prohibition on making, playing or even thinking about New Zealand Music for the other 11 months. So, in the words of The Naenae Express: “Everyone Deserves A Holiday”:
“Everyone deserves a Holiday/ Take a break for a while”. Has there ever been a finer song about needing, deserving a holiday? A song so woozy it is almost out on its feet, asleep at the wheel as it glides perfectly along. PopLib will be taking a holiday. You should take one too. If you are in NZ Monday is a holiday in honour of the birthday of the blood red monarch.
The Naenae Express created a peculiarly summery New Zealand style of observational psychedelic pop, at times incorporating a kind of stoned Pavement and Beta Band vibe and some sporting Kiwiana. Scott Kendall was the cricket-loving genius behind these well-crafted tunes. You’ll find him around Dunedin these days expertly playing every instrument (not at the same time) in multiple strange Dunedin bands.
Wellington electronic composer Ludus (Emma Bernard) released the wonderful trance album “Two of the Same”in 2021, a favourite in PopLib HQ ever since. Looking to see if there were any more recent releases this Ludus remix of a Sonya Waters ambient tune “Spring Tide” popped up, which was a chance way to discover her equally wonderful album “The Sheltering Ranges” also released in 2021:
There’s not many people with “fired from the Woodentops on the advice of producer Lee “Scratch” Perry” on their musical CV but Waters is better known for her part in NZ bands Fang and Black Swan White Swan (both with Ben Howe of Superette) and forming avoid!avoid with half of The Sublimals.
“The Sheltering Ranges” is an ambient album mixing synths with field recordings and voices. It’s not the usual ambient album, possessing a somewhat Kosmiche Musik sense of motorik propulsion at times, and also weaving in vocals, in the process creating what is essentially ambient pop music like “Spring Tide” here. The Ludus remix re-assembles some elements in different way and gives the tune more rhythmic structure. I love both versions, so here’s the original version as well to compare yourself:
The last PopLib post on Ghost Wave was in 2013 with a song from the debut album “Ages”. Here’s the gloriously psychedelic “Spaceman” from the follow up album “Norfolk Radio” released in 2016 on Flying Nun Records.
Ghost Wave’s “Norfolk Radio” album is the most recent full-length release. Maybe it was the last… 2018 was six years ago now. It’s a fine collection of melodic jangling psych-rock with a bit of electronica and a bit of motorik Kosmiche rock with echoes of mid-90s UK rock-into-euphoric dance/trance music as well as earlier generations of mid-90s Flying Nun Records catalogue. It’s certainly worth revisiting, or discovering for the first time.
Ghost Wave founder Matthew L. Paul re-emerged in 2021 as LEON with an album “Cherry” which goes almost full electronica and is an infectious collection, jam-packed with hyper-saturated heavy-psych electronic dance-pop with a bit of dub and funk worked into to the propulsive perma-grooves.
If you poke around on the Melted Ice Cream Records bandcamp with a stick for long enough you’ll find something sticky. Big Scout take me back – way back – to the angry shouty noisy exciting days of post-punk. And I mean actual post-punk, being the music that came just after punk in 1979-ish and was punk but with better basslines and weird abstract angular guitar and better social commentary lyrics and less spitting. Songs like Big Scout’s “Arthur Fuxake”:
Big Scout’s blurb, which you can’t actually read because it’s white text on a palest pale blue background, asks “Is it post punk? Well what the fuck is that anyway?” which is a good question and about the only helpful thing in the blurb. I mean it doesn’t even say “Big Scout is from Blenheim” which I think they are. Nothing comes from Blenheim. Nothing good at least. Not since Blenheimer wine ceased production, fancied up into something drinkable in the 1990s.
Someone else – I’ve forgotten who sorry – recently commented that “post-punk” is a meaningless genre because everything is “post-punk”. I mean, that’s true. It is 2024 now and 1979 is 35 years ago. But it if you were actually around in 1979 and listening to actual “post-punk” as it was happening then it does actually mean something and stuff that sounds like “post-punk” did in 1979 does in fact sound “post-punk” and it is indeed a useful genre tag when used correctly.
Anyway, I’m sure Chairman Jim – who no doubt has been hanging out for dirty NZ guitar rock like this all month – would agree this song (and the rest of the album) can indeed meet the “post-punk” sniff test. Not sure if the provincial English accent here is faux-provincial English because it fits the “post-punk” ethos or because the vocalist is an actual provincial English-person. There are also Kiwi excents on other tracks on the album. The shouty speak-sing vocals are literate and clever, too coherent to emulate the style of actual “post-punk” band The Fall, and are more like Art Brut (refer their “Formed a Band” here) who were about 25 years “post-punk” and usually referred to as “Art Wave” which I think we can all agree is an even sillier genre label than “post-punk.”
So… go poke Melted Ice Cream Records’ Bandcamp with a stick and see what you find.
Can’t have a daily NZ music post in May without featuring Vanessa Worm. Here’s the atypical bass/ drums/ guitar/ voice song “Everything You Do”:
Vanessa Worm originated in the Dunedin underground electronic/ experimental scene that developed in the now defunct None Gallery performance space. A move to Melbourne and EP releases on Glasgow’s Optimo dance label were followed by a hard to categorise first album “Vanessa 77” in 2020. Back in NZ and based in Auckland, Worm then self-released a follow-up album “Mosaics” last year.
The music Tessa Forde (Vanessa Worm) writes, produces and mixes could be called “electronic” or “dance” or “minimal techno” or “industrial” or “experimental”, or all of the above. Its willful oddness doesn’t fit easily in any comfortable singular music category or genre.
Although this track abandons electronic music altogether for post-punk guitar/bass/drums/vocals, the more usual VW approach involves tracks starting out as pneumatic techno or smooth Kruder & Dorfmeister style Balearic electronica with disturbed and disturbing vocal ruminations which are then sucked through the Worm-hole. It’s an agreeably subversive approach in this conformist age.
I mentioned the excellent Robert Scott solo album “The Green House” a few posts back when sharing a Tiny Ruins song. Tiny Ruins’ Hollie Fullbrook adds her distinctive vocals to five of the songs on the album. This one is delightful folk gem of a love song “Now In Your Hands”:
Mr Robert Scott of Port Chalmers is one of the most prolific songwriters around these parts. You’ll find his work on albums by Electric Blood, The Clean, The Bats, Magick Heads, and his solo albums. And that’s just the main stuff. There are so many side projects and one-offs it’s hard to keep up.
In his spare time he and partner Dallas run Pea Sea Art on the main street of Port Chalmers, where they sell art supplies, local albums, and exhibit and sell local art and crafts. He’s also an accomplished and equally prolific artist. There’s some of his paintings around PopLib HQ in fact – a spacemen and an Otago Harbour landscape, indicating probably his two great painting subject passions.
Can’t have too many Jim Nothing songs in a month of NZ music so what better way to start a shitty new week when you have to apply for a new job because the NZ Government wants to make 26,000 more people unemployed this year (targeting 50,000) to offset the inflationary effects their tax-cuts-for-landlords-and-the-wealthy will have on slowing down inflation in Godzone. This comes after it started it’s term of Government by vilifying the (smaller number of) unemployed and announcing a raft of additional requirements and sanctions for job seekers. Julian Cope and Jarvis Cocker wrote great songs to address such people but I’m a positive kind of person and the best cure for the banality of right wing populist politics is good music. “Hourglass” has the magic formula of simple delirious melodic fuzzy jangling guitar pop.
The first 6 notes of this song could play on a loop in my head forever and I’d be happy. Sometimes they do, but that’s the tinnitus. Maybe a phone ring-tone would be a better idea. Anyway there’s nothing particularly notable that can be said about this song. And nothing notable that needs to be said about this song. It’s existential philosophy about time slipping away, which is a good reason for enjoying the moment. In this case it’s a 2 minute 30 seconds moment. Enjoy.
After returning in 2022 with “Break” the most recent Fazerdaze release was “Bigger” towards the end of 2023. Hopefully that means some further release from Fazerdaze is brewing in its own good time.
“Bigger” continues the Fazerdaze template of brilliantly simple ingredients: layering guitar melody over a bass-line, and adding introspective lyrics. The squarewave synth melody plus note-bending fuzz-guitar (maybe also synth?) solo in the chorus adds an unexpected leftfield hook.
While PopLib tends to champion the underdog and Fazerdaze has become an international star (currently playing in the US) PopLib first featured Fazerdaze back in 2014 when the first EP had it’s initial hand-made CD-R format release which Amelia Murray was selling at her solo Fazerdaze shows. It was clear right from the start that the low-key and personal music made a connection with listeners. That’s still the case 10 years on.
Voom featuring Fazerdaze should sound like magic right? The late nineties/ early noughties champions of fuzzy melodic pop (voom) with the twenty-tens/ twenty-twenties champion of nineties-influenced melodic fuzzy pop (Fazerdaze). So here’s the “Magic” of Voom featuring Fazerdaze:
Both Voom/ Buzz Moller and Fazerdaze/ Amelia Murray do things in their own way in their own time.
Buzz Moller’s Voom has always been a two-sided affair, alternating between compellingly melodic genius fuzzy guitar pop and annoying willful weirdness. And that’s coming from someone who loves a bit of weirdness. But, you know, there’s weirdness and weirdness, and for whatever reason I just can’t play Voom’s “Hello, Are You There?” through very often even though it has some favourite songs on it.
Fazerdaze (Amelia Murray) has been a consistent producer of well-crafted melodic fuzzy guitar-pop right from the get-go 10 years ago when the self-released “Fazerdaze EP” was released, initially as a home-made CD-R with a hand-stitched sleeve, then re-issued on full CD. The album“Morningside”followed in 2017 then a break before returning with the “Break” EP/ mini-album in 2022.
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