“The Pip” by Recitals

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.

“Up The Harbour” by Seafog

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.

“Cinnamon” by T.G. Shand

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…

“Easter At The RSC” by Jim Nothing

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.

“Leanest Cut” by Death And The Maiden

Let’s stay in Dunedin some more… it’s home! A new release from Birdation started this run of posts. As noted two posts back Birdation’s Hope Robertson is better known for being the guitarist in Bad Sav and Dunedin’s post-punk+electronic slow-motion dance band Death And The Maiden. There’s finally a new, third album coming out from DATM, called “Uneven Ground”. The first single ahead of that release is “Leanest Cut”.

Bassist and vocalist Lucinda King is the bedrock here, musical guide and storyteller. Guitarist Hope Robertson weaves swooping, soaring motifs and guitar noise to build analogue atmosphere for this alternate world. Danny Brady’s beats mix old-school drum machines with electronic tones and distortion, amniotic synths and and field recordings.

“Leanest Cut” is an blurred moment in uncertain time, washed through with psychic unease and expressing the existential uncertainty that comes with both the passage of time and symptomatic of everything we have all been through these past 5 years.

Death In The Maiden’s eponymous 2014 debut was followed by the glorious and lushly detailed “Wisteria” in 2018. “Leanest Cut” here suggests the new album “Uneven Ground” will be a step up and outwards sonically, even as the lyrics turn more inward than the epic worlds evoked in some of the songs in “Wisteria”. All the familiar elements each person in the trio brings to their distinctive sound remain intact; at once familiar, but also different, like a new skin.

There’s also a video for the song, filmed by photographer Chris Schmelz in one of the bays around Port Chalmers using 16mm film that expired in the mid 60’s and hand-processed using caffenol in the laundry of his house. The white lawn furniture submerged in the water belonged to Lucinda’s nan and the video is a kind of cathartic reverence to the swirl of grief and memories she was feeling at that time.

While you are down the Death And The Maiden rabbit hole make sure you visit Thorn Dells, Lucinda King’s music with Nikolai Sim (Élan Vital). Their album “Silicon Pink” is one of the great unheralded masterpieces of Dunedin’s darkwave electronic pop scene, and an ideal companion piece to the works of Death And The Maiden.

“Say Whatever” by Pearly*

Let’s stay in Dunedin for the opening song from a thrilling eponymous first EP from newly-cultured noise rock outfit Pearly* – “Say Whatever“:

Pearly* are Joel Field (guitar, vocals), Phaedra Love (bass, vocals), Ryan Hill (guitar) and Josh Nicholls (drums) and this is an accomplished EP of well-constructed noisy pop songs. If you have loved the noisier side of Dunedin music in recent years (thinking of the likes of Bad Sav, Space Bats, Attack! Asta Rangu, Koizilla, Bathysphere, Dale Kerrigan et al.) then get your ears acquainted to Pearly* ASAP.

The next Bandcamp Friday is coming up in a few days on Friday 3 May, a great time to show Pearly* your appreciation and support. Also a great time to show other self-released bands and artists getting new sounds out to us your appreciation and support. If you need some more Bandcamp Friday inspiration just hit the back arrow above and explore what PopLib has been bringing to your attention in recent months…

“Haggard” by Birdation

It has been several years (8 to be exact) since the last Birdation release during which time chief ‘bird-racer’ and guitar/sound alchemist Hope Robertson has recorded a couple of Death And The Maiden albums and the exceptional been-and-gone eponymous Bad Sav album. So this new song “Haggard” is a momentous occasion:

“Haggard” is a gloriously upbeat (in a downbeat way) woozy lo-fi guitar-and-stuff instrumental woven through with dubby echoes of itself and semi-glitchy percussion and sound manipulation. It puts my head in the same space as recent favourites like the album of evocative guitar instrumentals “For The Morning” by Australian guitarist Sarah Hardiman under the alias LOU.

I could listen to a whole album of these exploratory experimental guitar tunes should Birdation ever by inclined to compose/ compile/ collate such a thing, hopefully not with an 8 year wait between each track.

[Update: Wish granted. Not even an 8 day wait for “a real handful” of Birdation tunes. Chur.]

“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.

“The Beginning of the End” by CL-Bob

When I posted a track by The Circling Suns in December I was trying to remember other wonderful and unusual avant-garde jazz albums created in New Zealand. It’s not a crowded field, but the glorious CL-Bob has now popped into memory again. Here’s “The Beginning of The End” from their excellent 2002 album “Stereoscope”

“Stereoscope” was the band’s second album and the New Zealand Jazz Album of the Year in 2002. They say they were aiming for some kind of Scandinavian groove-based minimalism. Sure, there’s some of that. I also get a lot of sultry Miles Davis “Sketches of Spain” melodic vibes at times and much more besides.

What stands out most is the fearlessness to bypass convention and go wherever their imaginations take them, which is frequently in directions not associated with mainstream modern jazz. That may have something to do with having initially formed in 1994 to play a surrealist party in Wellington. So it makes perfect sense for a tune (eg: “Titicaca”) starting out as the gentlest purest classic modern jazz to descend (or ascend?) into a musical bar brawl, then tip over into an interlude of musique-concrete, before finding it’s way back to the initial melody and mood.

At other times CL-Bob veer into Henry Cow/ Art Bears experimental avant-rock territory, working dissonances, rapid unexpected shifts in dynamics, layers of electronics, slabs of noise into the groove of the music. Even at it’s wildest extremes it’s more fun than fury, and always finds its way back to a melodic and magical heart.  

I think the band at this time was Nils Olsen* (saxophone, clarinet, flute, vocals) drummer Steve Cournane (The Alpaca Brothers), two guitarists Simon Bowden and Chris Williamson, trumpet and keyboard player Toby Laing trumpet, keyboards and bassist Tim Jaray.

[*As a bonus musical connection Nils Olsen plays saxophone on “In Dreams” from The Puddle album “Playboys in the Bush”].