“Candy Milk” by Negative Nancies

Negative Nancies are a noisy pop ensemble from Dunedin and “Candy Milk” here is from their debut 12″ EP “You Do You” which is released on 23 November on Christchurch arts&crafts label CocoMuse Releases.

“Candy Milk” has all the lurching anti-pop anarchy of Scottish post-punks Fire Engines, as it morphs from in-yer-face singalong punk blast, through spooky psych experimental zones, adding a dash of helter-skelter computer game soundtrack keys, and back again, to add up to one of the best unconventional pop hits to emerge from Dunedin.

In their own words: “Debut EP from Dunedin’s finest. Anxious polka-punk. Alt-fizz. Subgressive fun-time fantasiangst.”  The band seems refreshingly free of much in the way of online/ ‘social media’ presence so what you hear is what you get. And that’s plenty to chew on for the time being until the EP arrives and the remaining tracks are available.

“Adult Single” by Flo & Spicey

Please sit back, ensure your seat belt is securely fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray table is stowed away, as we prepare for take-off… it’s time to travel through space and time between Glasgow and Stockholm with Flo & Spicey on an “Adult Single”:

Flo & Spicey (real names Diana Jonsson & Colin Stewart) describe themselves as “a long distance studio collaboration between Glasgow and Stockholm. They make their music using old & discarded tech with a love for all things Joe Meek & Delia Derbyshire.”

It’s a kind of lo-fi retro-collage kind of magpie indie-pop where whistling kettles and stirring tea-spoons, railway station announcements, old TV soundbites and all kinds of noisy flotsam and jetsam are woven into bass and keyboard pop. It’s fun, it’s weird in a kind of Residents-meets-Stereoloab kind of way at times, and it’s all got a heart of pop as well.

Flo & Spicey’s Tea Set is highly recommended for fans of Broadcast and also contemporary exponents of this kind of dark, grainy experimental pop, like Exploded View.

“Lozenge” by Ben Woods

Fuzzy guitar pop aficionados look out! Here’s the excitable and great-tasting “Lozenge” with a very sticky melody and a very economic 1 minute 53 second running time.

Woods is a guitarist – and multi-instrumentalist – from Christchurch and you’ve probably seen him play in half the bands you’ve seen from that city (if you live in NZ, which you probably don’t, and go and see bands, which you hopefully still do – it’s good for you!).

He was in (at last count) River Jones, Fran, Wurld Series, Salad Boys and probably a bunch of others that never made it to Dunedin. Top guitarist, and “Lozenge” is his first outing on his own  and under his own name and it’s a winner. What’s not to like about a fuzzy lo-fi melodic pop gem under 2 minutes?

Woods is touring NZ at the moment, along with another PopLib favourite Motte. They play the Captain Cook in Dunedin tonight. Read all about the tour here.

“June” by Anto Pascoe

Day #18 of the May Month of Madness Marathon for NZ Music Month is “June” from the strange, melancholy, reverberating world of Anto Pascoe.

This weird but wonderful combination of reverb-drenched lo-fi keyboard pop-noir seems to channel equal parts East River Pipe, Galaxie 500 and early Beach House. There’s some guitar in here too, but it sounds like it’s being played in a concrete basement, a flight of stairs away from the microphone.

The album, called “To Escape”, is a cassette release from Christchurch label Melted Ice Cream. It’s great. Anto’s voice – often rising to a ghostly falsetto – and the sparse instrumentation blurred and softened by almost infinite delay, all add an enervated, washed out melancholy that’s much more fun than it might sound.