“Sink” by Faux Machismo

NZ Music Every Godzone Month! sign from Too Tone Records in Dunedin.

Our New Zealand Music Month day #25 song comes from Faux Machismo. Here’s the ominous crushing stoner-witch-doom-grunge of “Sink”:

Faux Machismo is Maeve Munro on guitar and vocals and Anna Ridley on drums and vocals. “Sink” is one of 4 songs on an EP also available on cassette.

Munro was, until a few years ago, an Auckland-based musician (Young Hellions, Cat Venom, Bengal Lights), now located in the small but significant NZ underground music enclave in Leeds, Yorkshire, in the U (for the time being) K.

Although the mood is set on pitch-black sludgy doom metal (think early Black Sabbath rehearsal room DIY recording vibes) there’s still a solid melodic and hypnotic heart to the songs that will be familiar to fans of Munro’s music as Young Hellions.

 

“South of Denim” by TRIUMPHS

Dunedin’s heavy viscosity sludge rockers TRIUMPHS return with an epic second album called “Computer Man” – available in a few months as a double 12″ LP. Here’s the shortest song “South of Denim”

If you like the crushing tones, twisting riffs and pile-driving drums of “South of Denim” you’ll love the whole album.

TRIUMPHS is guitarist John Bollen and drummer Mathew Anderson. “Computer Man” follows their excellent 2015 debut “Beekeeper​/​Bastardknocker” and it seems to have more of everything. As you would expect it’s mostly crushingly heavy, yet the album is also full of moments of sublime transcendent calm – try the start of the title track and the start of the 10 minute epic “Twang of the Void”.

In places the album is as menacingly dark and doom-laden as death-metal, as precise and patterned as math-rock, as adventurous as post-rock, and sometimes even as trippy and atmospheric as psychedelic rock. TRIUMPHS instrumental exploration of these various styles is complex but crafted with personality and always much more than an exercise in technique.  It’s an album that belongs in a wide range of record collections.

“Forests” by Pesk

“Forests” is the opening track from an 8-song mini-album called “Ground” by Port Chalmers-based dark and doomy shoegaze duo Pesk.

There’s an atmosphere of dark magic throughout the whole album, and this opening track is a sublime starting point for your journey into Pesk’s world.

The trademark Pesk fuzzed out reverb sludge-guitar fills this dark forest like a dense fog, while those crunching syn-drums are like a giant’s foot-steps. The shimmering keyboards, Nico-esque vocal and then that unexpectedly exultant chorus melody provide the transcendent touches to a spellbinding song.

The rest of the album continues with a similar strong and uncompromising tone.  They refer to their sound as combination of shoegaze, industrial and cold wave but there’s also a fair chunk of stentorian doom-laden metal about the rumbling density of their sound.