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.
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.
Staying with ever-reliable Christchurch label Melted Ice Cream, here’s another excellent new band released on the label in the past year. Senica are a band made up of schoolfriends and “Under their Feet” is a highlight of their “Passing Tide” EP
The precocious Senica sound like Christchurch in ways I can’t possibly describe. If Dunedin ever had a sound (it didn’t) then Christchurch had several sounds. This kind of accomplished emotionally charged guitar pop was one of them from the 1980s through to the early 2000s. There’s all sorts of glorious touches here – the tinkling piano, the guitar chords, and that filigree guitar ornamentation in the instrumental break are sublime.
There’s also shades of a very Australian kind of guitar pop here too, a sense that it is haunting by the same kind of post-adolescence/ early adulthood Australasian suburban ennui as Ocean Party maybe. Anyway, it’s another unheralded underground NZ release worth buying and living with for a while and giving it a chance to take residence in your imagination and memory.
Christchurch independent label Melted Ice Cream is a reliable source of great new underground music. Horn released a self-title album back in June and it’s a dark and tumultuous wonder. Here’s Te Whanganui-a-Tara/ Wellington trio Horn with the dark “All My Breathing”:
The guitars in “All My Breathing” start with some backwards riffing before re-orienting to snarl and slash and twist a sinuous pathway through a dark brooding song of betrayal (?). The video released for the song is an outstanding work of delightfully grotesque artistic visual experimentation.
Horn is Abigail Macilquham, Rebekah Leah and Rohan Hill and their eponymous debut is straight-to-Tascam 424 MK III cassette multi-track post-punk, post-grunge, post-metal, post-apocalyptic, post-everything, occasionally supplemented by an almost Avant-Garde injection of subtle synth squirts and chirps.
This blog has been out of action, or itinerant at best, for too long. I’ve been motivated into re-activating things (well, here’s hoping anyway…) by a shameless piece of clickbaity opinion on a prominent NZ media website, bemoaning the lack of coverage of NZ music in NZ. It’s shameless because the same website when it first started out and was finding its audience had a fair bit of music and culture writing unlike most of the mainstream media it was competing with. But somewhere along the journey to becoming a major online webzine it presumably made the business decision that the clicks-to-cost ratio of writing about NZ music wasn’t lucrative enough. So they pretty much stopped writing about music unless it was Very Popular Music, or a dumb cultural take on something involving music. Or an article lamenting how tough it was for NZ musicians nowadays because nobody wrote about NZ music, which failed to mention how they stopped writing about NZ music too.
That all reminded me why I started PopLib 10 years ago. It was because “those of us who are still excited by music, and who still value the creativity of people driven to make and release ‘unpopular pop music’, need to do something to help other music lovers find it.”
So, that’s a long way to say hello again, and to share the most glorious new tune on the new Wurld Series album “The Giant’s Lawn” with you – “World of Perverts”.
The first Wurld Series album, recorded pre-Covid era, asked (or maybe just stated) “What’s Growing”. The answer is now clearly “The Giant’s Lawn”. But back in 2021 when the first album was released what was growing then was an album of lovable skronky fuzzy pop’n’weirdness that seemed influenced in equal parts by Pavement, Guided by Voices and maybe local legacy of the like of 3Ds and The Clean.
“The Giant’s Lawn” however has largely broken free of those early influences and is untethered (and also somewhat unhinged) in it’s own fantasy-psychedelia-folk-rock universe of sound. The songs that Wurld Series songwriter/ guitarist/ vocalist Luke Towart has created here sound less “Pavement-esque” (especially after the raucous “Queen’s Poisoner”) and radiate more of a Rain Parade Paisley Underground psychedelia-via-Ogden’s Nutgone Flake whimsical-but-dark vibe overall throughout the wonderfully varied album.
The weird fantastical world the album inhabits may be off-putting to ‘serious’ music heads because it almost seems like the kind of children’s storybook world that someone would write under the influence of magic mushrooms, but the lyrics suggest that there’s a very obtuse metaphorical load being carried by the concept of this odd world of containing giant, Queen, pugilist, flies, mole, servant, fortress, tower, The Cloven Stone, Dean of the Dead Pike, and a Fanciful Assault Vehicle among other things.
The other noteworthy features of the album are some lovely acoustic guitar interludes with field recordings which help involve us listeners in this alternative world, and the glorious concoction of musical arrangements featuring at times saxophone, mellotron and wheezy synths.
A better option though than reading me wax lyrical about this joy of a record is just to listen to the thing and maybe buy it if you like it. Just because nobody’s writing about music doesn’t mean we have to give up on finding, listening to, sharing and buying new stuff. If you like “The Giant’s Lawn” tell everyone you know about it, buy for your friends’ Christmas.
Wurld Series are Luke Towart, Brian Feary, Ben Woods and Ben Dodd and the album is released on everyone’s favourite Christchurch record label Melted Ice Cream (and also on Meritorio offshore).
Ben Woods is now two albums deep into a singular journey to the heart of “Antipodean Gothic”. His first solo album “PUT”set the scene, but retained something of the recognisable guitar-pop roots of his previous role as wielder of a Gibson Flying-V guitar in bands like Wurld Series etc. His latest journey to slowed-down weird-pop is “Dispeller” and the opening track is “Fame”:
“Fame” is a strange, slow, woozy thing. Reminds me a bit of The Everly Brothers’ “All I have To Do Is Dream” but this dream is an unsettling, disorienting one, in which the dreamer is slowly falling, forever.
“Dispeller” features less guitar than “PUT” – and what guitar there is if often stripped to the minimum – and more piano, and also more sonic musical – and anti-musical – sound treatments assembled, stretched, twisted, distressed, disordered…
As “Fame” indicates there’s melodic pop still at the heart of the warped songs, and many haunting moments among the sonic ruins. Woods is joined on vocals by Charlotte Forrester (WOMB) on two tracks and Lucy Hunter (Opposite Sex, Wet Specimen) on one, adding additional spectral counterpoints to Woods’ soothing croon. The album may take a few plays to re-orientate the listeners into this world, but once settled these songs are things of strange beauty.
There are moments throughout “Dispeller” that remind me of the DIY sonic experimentation of Tall Dwarfs, the damaged pop of Sparklehorse, and the hypnotic minimalism of Spaceman 3. The overwhelming sense here is of classic slow pop music warped and twisted through a kind of Twin Peaks lens; a deeply personal performance beaming from the Black Lodge’s Red Room.
“To other New Zealanders, Christchurch seems to be a desolate, xenophobic, flat city, which in the wake of a series of natural disasters is being sparsely put back together by a bunch of brutal development moguls. It’s also a city with a thriving indie rock scene, unspoiled by commercial interests and held together by bands all drawing from the same small pool of members and venues. Christchurch has a rare grit.” [From the Bandcamp notes to “PUT”]
The name’s Nothing. Jim Nothing. I like my secret alt-pop agents under-stated, DIY, and a bit rough-hewn around the edges. I like them even more when they arrive with a new album out of nowhere after several years of, well, nothing, and floor you with strange, unexpected new sounds. In this case, lo-fi, DIY, cassette release Jim Nothing has simultaneously fulfilled, exceeded, and confounded early promise. Collaborating with an avante-garde violinist/vocalist Anita Clark (Motte) is an unexpected turn for a shambling jangling fuzzy guitar pop Nothing. On the strength of the two initial songs released ahead of Jim Nothing’s “In The Marigolds” album in September, it’s a glorious combination. Here’s “Yellow House”:
It’s been 7 years since the initial run of 2 cassette EPs and a split cassette EP with Wurld Series. Since then Nothing’s alter-ego James Sullivan has been busy in all manner of bands, including drummer for Salad Boys. This time round the ubiquitous Brian Feary is drumming, while also recording, mixing, mastering “In The Marigolds”. Feary is the heart & soul of Christchurch’s underground DIY scene and Melted Ice Cream Records, a 21st century Chris Knox if you like, without the jandals and shorts.
But it’s the pairing of melodic string instrument talents with violinist and vocalist Anita Clark (her own extraordinary sound explorations under the name Motte) that gives these two initial songs (and presumably the whole album) an unexpected melodic richness and sonic balance. Clark’s violin parts on “Yellow House” evoke the dark drone spirit The Velvet Underground’s John Cale in the verse, and the melodic flight of The Go-Between’s Amanda Brown in the chorus.
The album is released on vinyl – a white and black option – and will have a European release too via Meritorio Records in Madrid, Spain. It was an instant “Buy Now” for me on the strength of these two tracks. Can’t wait to get lost in the marigolds with Jim Nothing in a few months when this is fully released.
…And while we are in Ōtautahi Christchurch, and still with Melted Ice Cream Records, here’s something completely different from Local Tourist, also released last month. “Colors” is the opening track from a quiet album of introspection called “Other Ways of Living”:
“Other Ways of Living” also features the bassist on the previously featured Best Bets album, Joe Sampson. He’s more familiar as a guitarist, cranking out sublime noise with a variety of Christchurch bands (T54, Salad Boys, etc.) and it’s as guitarist and bassist that he appears here, but in a more subdued, reflective mood.
US born songwriter Erin Umstead was living in Christchurch, New Zealand and frequenting local live music venue Darkroom where she met bassist/guitarist Joe Sampson (Salad Boys, T54) and drummer Rory Dalley (Ben Woods Group). Local Tourist formed, However, the pandemic and visa complications halted any chance of extensive touring and Umstead was forced to leave her adopted home, but not before the group recorded this album, over her last few days in New Zealand.
The album is an immersive listen. If you are familiar with the work of Wellington’s WOMB, and American Analog Set, then you will understand the power of introspection.
Back to NZ, where’s there’s been a flurry of new releases as summer turns to autumn downunder. One person Ōtautahi/ Chr istchurch-based shoegaze pop enigma T. G. Shand (Annemarie Duff) has just released a new song “Little Sieve” also available as a very limited edition lathe-cut single.
Compared to the preceding single “Seats” released in December – a thrilling mix of electro-clash of Curve-style crunchy drum-heavy layered guitar rock, clattering post-punk bass, Cocteau Twins-style liquid guitars and a hyper-melodic chorus of layered heavenly voices – “Little Sieve” here dials back the noise for a blissful a lighter-than-air atmospheric dream-gaze-pop song, delivered in a vocal version and in an equally wonderful instrumental version mixed with field recordings.
Here’s a fabulous brand new slice of 21st century post-shoegaze guitar-pop from Christchurch musician Annemarie Duff flying as T. G. Shand.
Following on from two excellent singles earlier this year – “The Ease” back in February, and “Lemony” in July – “Seats” here is the most arresting and sonically complex of the three.
It’s a little bit off kilter, in a very good way, rocking a mesmerising electro-clash of Curve-style crunchy drum-heavy layered guitar rock, clattering post-punk bass, Cocteau Twins-style liquid guitars and a hyper-melodic chorus of layered heavenly voices.
What’s ahead in 2022 from T. G. Shand? Download these songs and follow the T. G. Shand Bandcamp and you will find out directly as soon as something new is released.
Pop Lib 