New Stuff Round-Up March:
Night People / Australasia Special.

A lot of my musical discovering this month has taken place via the auspices of a (legally) downloaded compilation tape put out by the Iowa based Night People label. Probably best-known at this stage for releasing the first few Peaking Lights records, they’ve also knocked out a herculean number of low-numbered tape releases over the past couple of years, featuring an applaudably wide stylistic/geographical spread of under-the-radar groups.

Reeling in what I assume to be one track a piece from each band/artist associated with the label, NP’s ‘Dada Damage’ comp is a mixed bag for sure, opening with a whole bunch of songs I’m not that bothered about (‘god-help-us-if-there’s-a-war’ style wimpy electro-pop, dead-eyed ‘80s fancy dress, etc) and closing with a whole bunch of songs I’m not too bothered about (murky ‘triangle time’ hyponogogery of an unappealing hue, etc). Wedged in the middle though is a solid kernel of utter greatness, ready for the intrepid explorer to seize and make off with, pursued by rolling boulders and angry, keytar-wielding natives.

That said kernel intersects almost exactly with the point at which the Night People roster verges onto recognisable indieish-rock with guitars and live drums is, I would like to think, mere coincidence, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own prejudices and hardwired cultural expectations. I mean, that would just be silly, right? Clearly the rockier stuff on here is just objectively better. If we were still living in the glory days when up & coming independent labels could conceivably have staff and resources, I’d picture a bunch of genre-specialist A&R people sitting in Night People’s swanky offices, with the indie-rock guy just totally wired all day, MAKIN’ IT HAPPEN, whilst the others slouch around half-asleep. More likely, Night People is just one guy in a college dorm or something, but who knows, maybe his/her brain is stratified in equivalent fashion?

Anyway, enough of that. This Night People comp has introduced me to more solid stuff than any label sampler in recent memory, rendering blog snark and obtuse speculation as to the compiler’s psychological make-up wholly unnecessary.

It’s also interesting to note that, despite NP being US based, ALL of my favourite tracks on the tape originate from Australia or New Zealand. It’s not my place to speculate on who made the connection, but it sounds like it’s working out pretty damn well for both continents. Good work, Night Peoples!



First up, Wellington, NZs Terror Of The Deep verily knocked me out with their ‘I Am Ocean’, a real dose of what passes for that ol’ time religion for us frail slobs raised on K Recs and Sonic Youth. Sounding not unlike a happy, upbeat version of The Embarrassment, or a slightly less ethereal early Chills track, it carries that same unquenchable optimism that propelled the latter to great heights. The rush of a new, creative band simply *happening*, the kind of indie-rock that makes you temporarily forget what a festering cesspool indie rock is and just smile in fleeting amazement. A smashing tune.

There is definitely a Flaming Lips comparison to be made vis-à-vis Terror Of The Deep’s capacity for being earnest without sucking – the hardest game in town just at the moment I feel. Investigating further via their Bandcamp, they do sadly fall victim to the usual pitfalls of earnestness – long songs, under-developed rhythms, over-developed sleeve notes. But the unflappable NZ demeanour and Chillsian shine often sees ‘em through, and when the singer exclaims “ I believe in time travel!” on ‘Here and Now’, it almost cuts through my cynicism. Almost. My patronising talent show advice: there’s something good transpiring here, but you need to edit and compress the material fellas – edit and compress, and give the drummer something to work with while yr at it.





Even better, ‘Footscray Station’ by the curiously named Scott & Charlene’s Wedding will knock your fucking socks off if you feel any kinship at all with the mighty, bedraggled rust-belt blues embodied by Dead Moon’s ballads, Cheater Slicks circa ‘Forgive Thee’ or any gang of stranded mechanics who’ve ever assembled in a shed to distil ‘Tonight’s The Night’/’Darkness on the Edge of Town’ grandeur into a bullshit-free nugget or two of overdriven blurt that’s never going to get anywhere near a radio, even if it sounds like it was composed and performed in close proximity to one... if you get my drift. Rock n’ roll always has this great capacity for taking someone’s howl of complaint at being in a place they don’t want to be and spinning it out into a kind of transcendence that we who are in the place we wanna be can scarcely even imagine. And that’s what’s happening here.

A self-described artist/musician based somewhere between Adelaide, New York and Melbourne, I’d take main guy Craig Dermody’s lyrical declaration that he’s “still drivin’ trucks” with a pinch of salt, but that he’s “makin’ no bucks” would sadly seem like a given. The Scott & Charlene’s Wedding LP ‘Para Vista Social Club’ – an excellent, if slightly overwhelming, listen throughout – was released in a long sold-out run of 200 copies, each housed in a one-off charity shop sleeve, modified by Dermody with images of witches, monsters and other such paraphernalia. Wrecking a copy of ‘Liege and Lief’ seems a bit beyond the call of duty, but nonetheless, the results look amazing – check ‘em out - and if you only hit one button today, make it 'play' on the track below.




‘I Don’t Care To Try’ by Melbourne’s Mole House is another ‘Dada Damage’ highlight, bringing some heavy Messthetics vibes with its searching bass, hesitant guitar and a drummer who completely fails to find a rhythm. All anchored by the male vocalist’s plaintive croon, it sounds kind of like an early line-up of The Go-Betweens playing whilst under the influence of heavy sedatives. Works for me! In fact if more of the things that get labelled ‘indie-pop’ incorporated the kind of right wrong directions taken in the second half of this song, I’d be a happy man.

The songs on their bandcamp (not including the one on the tape, sadly) are even more wrecked, verging on complete loss-of-all-motor-functions un-musical disintegration in places, but are all the better for it in a weird sort of way – as intricate and inexplicably charming as a band called ‘Mole House’ rightly should be, like three creatures slowly building a new language from scratch so that they can communicate their love for each other.



Check it out, Mole House in action!




Even more fantastically wonky, home-recorded guitar pop comes next, from Adelaide’s Peak Twins. Their passive-aggressive ‘Your Love’ kinda sounds like I always hoped Sebadoh might sound, before I actually heard them. Even more pleasingly (to me at least), many of the songs on their Bandcamp branch out further, taking a winningly psychedelic direction, with neat vocal harmonies and a great, low-key reverb-loaded production, emerging with something not unlike The Beets pretending to be The Brian Jonestown Massacre (christ, there’s a thought for you).

Such alarming notions aside, songs like ‘Waiting Room’ and ‘Sylvias’ are genuinely magnificent efforts; melancholy, slurred bits of crystalline bother that - like all the groups I’ve written up in this post, actually – evoke a kind of clear-eyed purpose and skyscraping scope that raises them above and beyond the kind of aimless, self-absorbed moping that the surface signifiers of this-kinda-thing would tend to imply. Brilliant cover of ‘Needles & Pins’ too. Really special.



And there’s plentiful non-Australasian good stuff on the tape too of course: Lantern’s beautiful hypnotic guitar strum/drone thing, Sore Eros soundin’ a lot better than they did on that Hozac 7” I reviewed a while back, China's Xaio Hong & Xaio Xaio Hong creeping around all abstract and unnerving, and a better class of hyponogogical ‘80s dress-up altogether from Featureless Ghost. Happy days.

Info on all Night People releases and a free download of the ‘Dada Damage’ tape can be found here:

http://raccoo-oo-oon.org/np/

Labels: Australia, Mole House, New Zealand, Night People label, Peak Twins, Scott and Charlene's Wedding, Terror of the Deep

Great Garage-Rock Ranting Song of the Week # 1



The La-De-Das – How Is The Air Up There?

“Your father is a VIP, thinks he’s always right
Your mother watches her TV, won’t talk to you all night
Couldn’t help sitting up so high, you got a bloody nose
You never seen a flower or a tree or anything that small”

Available on:

Wild Things: Wyld Kiwi Garage ’66-‘69
Nuggets II box set

Labels: Great Garage Rock Ranting Songs, New Zealand, The La De Das

My First New Zealand Pop CD.



>> Download. <<
(90mb .zip file)

Sleevenotes:

The odd and beguiling sounds emanating from New Zealand, from the birth of the legendary Flying Nun label at dawn of the ‘80s onwards, have exerted a huge influence on the world of underground guitar pop and weirdo music in general over the past twenty five years. To see that, you only need look at the impressive rollcall of indie troops marshaled for the recent benefit concerts and album for scene mainstay/Tall Dwarfs member/venerable four-track wizard Chris Knox, who has sadly suffered a stroke.

Due to poor distribution, a lack of overseas publicity and the virtual invisibility of many of the scene’s key recording though, the NZ music has remained a pretty ‘cult’ concern over the years – the sole province of those nerdy enough to actually seek out scattered background info and pay inflated prices and international shipping for weird records by scrappy bands, sound unheard.

For the rest of us, the internet has helped a hell of a lot of course, with most of the key Flying Nun bands being widely featured on assorted shady and not-so-shady download blogs, allowing instant access to those of us who’ve heard the hallowed names of The Clean and The Verlaines being tossed around for years, but have never actually heard the music. Long story short: the record nerds were right, IT’S GREAT, and I’ve been consuming as much as I can get my hands on over the past couple of years.

Mentioning this to otherwise well-informed people now and then, I’ve sometimes had response like “wow, there are bands in New Zealand..?”, and this makes me sad. Frankly, anyone who enjoys the work of all the classic American/British indie-rock bands from the ‘80s/’90s really deserves the chance to hear this music, and will almost certainly get a real kick out of it, I hope.

So obviously this is a mix CD I’ve thrown together of some of my favourite Flying Nun/NZ tracks. Even though I’ve started with a few of the scene-defining hits, the emphasis is definitely on “my favourite”, as opposed to “the best/most representative”, so if you like what you hear here there are still whole (kaleidoscope) worlds left to explore.

I’ve started out with some of the defining moments from most of the essential early Flying Nun bands, but things get a bit weirder in the second half of the disc where I’ve included a bunch of my favourite tracks that originated on the Xpressway label (largely pulled from their excellent “Making Losers Happy” singles anthology). The early Xpressway stuff I think presents a useful bridge between the more pop-orientated Flying Nun sound and New Zealand’s equally fertile loner/noise underground… but that’s another story that some of these cuts will hopefully give you a taste of.

I’d imagine any, er, Kiwi-heads (if you will) stumbling upon this post will be pretty outraged by the limited scope of my selections (Wot, no Gordons? No Bailterspace? Straightjacket Fits? 3Ds? Sneaky Feelings? Birds Nest Roys? Three Bats tracks and only one by Tall Dwarfs? etc), but again, I’ve gone for the stuff I like the best – make yr own comp and I’ll be glad to put up a link.

For the record, tunes reluctantly nixed for running time reasons included “Joe 90” by Bored Games, “ Venus Fly Trap” by Goblin Mix, Marie & The Atom, “Life Is Strange” by Tall Dwarfs, “Oncoming Day” by The Chills and something off the Toy Love album. I can’t really defend pushing that lot out in favour of squeezing in six Clean tracks… what can I tell you? I just really like The Clean. If you’ve not heard them before, hopefully you will too.

And if you do, why not show some love by doing the decent thing and buying their excellent “Mister Pop” album from last year, or the Chris Knox tribute comp, or that last Bats record, or whatever?

Images on the cover are taken from the pop video I still want to live in:



I can’t stress enough how brilliant and magical the songs on this CD are – please give them a listen.

Labels: Chris Knox, mixtapes, New Zealand, The Clean, The Verlaines

Bats!

I went to see The Bats at The Windmill last night, and they were bloody terrific.

Apparently it was the first show they’ve played in the UK for fifteen years. It’s funny; I guess there must be hundreds, nay thousands, of similarly middle-aged bands in Europe and America, all working a similar strain of low-key, Velvets-indebted guitar-pop, all with some Mojo reviewer on hand to call them ‘slow-burning’ or ‘smouldering’, all of them boring me to tears. What is it about New Zealand that allows these guys to take the same formula and make it so definitively beautiful, so fresh-faced and innocent you just wouldn’t believe they’ve been doing it for over two decades of record/tour/record etc.?

I guess The Bats are a hard sell, as a band. I can’t imagine ever playing a Bats CD for someone and expecting it to *blow their mind*. There’s nothing there on the surface that you haven’t heard a thousand times before, probably done with more noise and enthusiasm. But to us hopeless snobs, who (pity us) end up sampling indie guitar bands as if they were fine wines, delighting in the subtleties of different strumming patterns, guitar tones, minimal drum beats, understated melodies... well it doesn’t get much better than The Bats. Robert Scott introduced one song as being about “lying on your back on the grass in the winter and looking at stuff in the sky”, but he needn’t have said anything, cos that’s what the music actually sounded like. Masters at work, so to speak.

Here’s what they looked/sounded like quite a few years ago. The male members have less hair circa 2009, but aside from that they haven’t changed much:



I’ll mention that they’re playing at both the ICA and the Victoria, Mile End tonight, just on the off chance that anyone in London reads this before about 8pm this evening and exclaims “Of course! The Bats! That’s my kind of Friday night!” It’s an experience I’d heartily recommend.

I’d be tempted to finish by saying “and to think, some people listen to Crystal Stilts”, but such a gratuitous diss would seem out of keeping with this post’s positive, optimistic tone. Let’s aim higher.

And to think, some people listen to R.E.M. : P

Labels: New Zealand, The Bats, videos

Six Reasons Why I Want To Live In New Zealand in the Early 1980s

After all that marathon record-writin' over the past month or so, I think I’ve earned myself the right to do a post full of videos, so here it is. Actually though, I’ve had this one up my sleeve for a while now.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently listening to some of the ‘classic-era’ New Zealand / Flying Nun bands. Some would say this is simply the next natural stopping off point for the discerning indie-geek who’s already plundered the vaults of British and American esoteric guitar pop for all they’re worth. Others rather further down that same woeful path may gasp in feigned disbelief that I, who call myself a music fan, previously used to make it through the day WITHOUT an intimate knowledge of the career of David Kilgour or whoever. Myself, I would simply point to off-the-scale levels of creativity, talent, originality and humour of these groups, the impeccably DIY/punk spirit underpinning all of their work, their consistently great songs and smart refashioning of underground rock influences, together with the somewhat eerie, eccentric atmosphere imposed on the scene by – I’m assuming – the sheer geographical isolation of life in NZ, and I would ask how anyone who’s taken the time to investigate it can possibly STOP listening to this wonderfully out of space / out of time music.

One of the joys of discovering the early Flying Nun bands in the internet age is that they all seem to have put a lot of effort into making great, imaginative homemade videos to accompany their great, imaginative homemade songs, and many of these have now been faithfully youtubed. Watching them can provide a perfect introduction to the scene for those who are unfamiliar with it, as well as a whole truckload of low budget pop video fun… assuming your idea of fun includes watching antipodean geeks hop about with guitars in the early 1980s. Needless to say, mine does, and these videos make me very happy indeed.

So to get straight down to business, here’s The Verlaines ‘Death And The Maiden’, perhaps my favourite music video of all time, and I can’t even explain why. I must have watched it about thirty times. The song, the lyrics, the aesthetic, the imagery, the spirit, the curious people who slowly appear and the weird way they dance to the song's peculiar middle section, the bare house and the landscape shots, the bunny rabbits, the bass player's sweater, the girl holding the rabbit and looking lost at 4:12 – everything about it. I want to MAKE THE WORLD more like this video.



Now here’s ‘Anything Can Happen’ and ‘Beatnik’ by The Clean. The more I listen to The Clean’s early stuff, the more of an inspiration it becomes on every level. Need I say more? Watch, watch and all will be clear.





Next up: The Chills. Now I know a lot of people really flip for their Submarine Bells / Heavenly Pop Hit era, and yeah, that stuff’s alright, but for me it’s all about their first few Flying Nun singles. Here for instance is the video for ‘Pink Frost’, which I think was their second, third single..? Something like that. The song is beautiful anyway – as artful a bit of spine-tingling ‘80s moodiness as you’ll ever encounter, fusing lyrics reminiscent of Husker Du’s ‘Pink Turns To Blue’ to the band’s trademark sorta-otherworldly guitar/synth tones. It's possibly not the most exciting video ever shot, but the song itself will have you sold within 90 seconds, and shortly after that the thoroughly misguided singing scarecrow turns up, and you're home safe.



Somewhat lower on the international pop radar than the big names I’ve posted above are the excellently named Look Blue Go Purple, one of the only (the only?) all-female bands to sign to Flying Nun, a few years after the initial heyday of the bands I’ve mentioned above. I’ve been listening to the compilation album of their various EPs/singles a lot recently, and it’s really, really wonderful – smart, spaced out, understated pop of the best possible kind, all centred on some wondrous post-VU guitar strumming of the kind I could happily listen to forever. More people should be aware of this band, I feel. So I typed their name into Youtube, not expecting much, and lo and behold, here’s the charming video for their song ‘Cactus Cat’, along with some brief interview clips. Fantastic stuff – god bless you, internet. (There’s a great live video out there of them covering Buffy St. Marie’s ‘Codine’ in their own unique style too if you’re interested; and you should be interested, cos it's great.)



Dragged even further out to sea by the tides of obscurity, here’s another great, lost video by a NZ artist called Jay Clarkson, of whom I know nothing except that she used to be in bands such as The Playthings and The Expendables. Of whom I also know nothing at the time of writing. ‘The Boy With The Sad Hands’ is a pretty sweet song though, so let's hope she did some more. What I really love though is the brilliant ‘animated band’ conceit of the video… so simple, so weird, so effective – an example of homemade genius that on some level exemplifies everything I love about the Flying Nun aesthetic. Look at the attention the guys behind the screen are putting into trying to fit in with the song, look at the ‘drummer’s cigarette, and somewhere out of the corner of your eye, you’ll see it.



If you’d like to learn more….

Watch a feature length TV documentary on the Flying Nun label here.

Say hello to them here.

Much of the label’s best stuff is out of print and difficult to track down though, so, mum’s the word you understand, but you could do worse than have a look at Kiwi Tapes and The Doledrums if you want to hear some of this stuff. Happy hunting!

Labels: 1980s, Flying Nun, Jay Clarkson, Look Blue Go Purple, New Zealand, The Chills, The Clean, The Verlaines, videos