Meanwhile back in Dunedin Bathysphere released a gem of an album in 2021 that you may not have discovered yet. Here they “Lay Out” their Dunedin post-noise-rock sound:
Bathysphere is made up of a who’s-who of the Dunedin music underground, including Trace / Untrace Records founders Julie Dunn (Asta Rangu, Mary Berry) and Richard Ley-Hamilton (Asta Rangu, Space Bats, Attack!, Males), with Josh Nicholls (Koizilla, Space Bats, Attack!, Asta Rangu, Fazed on a Pony, Pearly*) and Peter McCall (Fazed on a Pony).
The music is kind of noise-rock, kind of post-rock, kind of shoegaze. Unconsciously it somehow provides echoes – if you listen carefully – of elements from each of the past four decades of that distinctive low-key understated noisy Dunedin guitar rock. In particular there’s something of the spirit of Bad Sav in the songs on this album and the way the guitars construct the sonic structures that give these songs their shape and atmosphere, but with some added dissonance.
Dunn’s introspective vocals are submerged in the mix, which has the disorienting effect of providing subdued contrast to the guitar-wrestling noise and also drawing the listener in to get enveloped in the whole band sound.
Yesterday’s New Zealand music post was Beastwars imaginative cover of Superette’s “Waves”, so here’s the original track from the band’s (only) album “Tiger”:
It’s such a lovely tune if you don’t listen to the lyrics, which are about a rural murderer contemplating his own death: “Waves, I don’t wanna live today/ Ocean, ocean blue take me away”.
“Tiger” – originally released in 1996 and on Bandcamp as an expanded edition with tracks from their first EP “Rosepig” and demos for an unrecorded second album – is the work of former Jean-Paul Sartre Experience/ JPSE guitarist/ vocalist/ songwriter David Mulcahy, drummer/ vocalist Greta Anderson and bassist Ben Howe.
It’s notable for being one of a small handful of great mid/late 1990s albums by the third or fourth wave of bands released on Flying Nun Records which were/are never accorded quite the same love and attention here and overseas as those 1980s first/ second-wave albums.
As one of three songwriters in JPSE Mulcahy presumably had a full songbook of tunes that were not elevated to album status in that band. So the expanded “Tiger” includes “Rosepig” EP songs “Slide” and “Disappear” originally written for JPSE. Pretty sure I heard “Slide” played live not long before the band split up in 1994 – that chorus kiss-off is hard to forget – while “Disappear” also had a life as a JPSE song, a 1992 demo version included as one of the extra tracks on their “Into You” CD single in 1993.
The 2023 self-titled debut from House of All – redemption songs by survivors of The Fall – was what we in the trade call “A Grower”. The thrill of two thundering drummers (Paul Hanley and Simon Wolstencroft) and the gravitational pull of those neutron star bass riffs (Steve Hanley) underpinned a collection of exuberant and irreverent songs fronted by (totally) wired guitarist/ poet/ singer/ exhorter-in-chief Martin Bramah that became more and more joyful and memorable the more times they hammered into the listener’s skull. At the time of its release Bramah hinted there was more to come from the group. Here’s the first offering from second album “Continuum”, called “Aim Higher”.
House of All leader Martin Bramah (Blue Orchids, Factory Star) was a founding member and style-creator of The Fall from 1977 to 1979 and the only sacked member (there were lots of those) to rejoin The Fall (for the “Extricate” album 1989-1990) and then be sacked again by Mark E. Smith.
The best way for survivors of The Fall to pay tribute to the late curmudgeon Mark E. Smith is to do something he would disapprove of (House of All), but to do it so well that, were he still alive, he’d be even more enraged about not being part of it.
For reasons best known to Bramah the chorus of “Aim Higher” appropriates the chilling phrase “step we gaily, on we go”, the opening words of Sir Hugh Robertson’s appropriation/ re-writing of John Robert Bannerman’s 1930’s song “Mairi’s Wedding” (also known as the “Lewis Bridal Song”) with his own faux-traditional lyrics. The garbled language of this opening line comes across as something that might be uttered by a deranged Celtic Yoda. To add insult to injury, in 1959 James B. Cosh devised a Scottish Country Dance to the tune, thereby blighting the life of many a child during the 1960s and 1970s bizarrely forced to dance to it and other Scottish Country Dances at school in New Zealand and possibly other parts of the Anglosphere world as some kind of weird colonial cultural conditioning.
Anyway, I digress. Despite the triggering connotations of the phrase, Martin Bramah’s regular exhortations to “aim higher! aim higher!” crack the manic music master’s whip, and the crew of fellow recovering ex-Fall members power their way through another brilliant hard-edged pop tune with expressive storytelling from Bramah. “People thought I was off my head!” he shouts in this song, typical of the chemistry of the infectiously enthusiastic weirdness and mischief of House of All.
For House of All completists there’s a fun live/ re-mix album as well called Bay City Pistols “including the crowd fave Wet Leg / Can cover, “Ur Mum” / “Uphill”, which lasts over 10 minutes”.
Pop Lib 