A Beautiful Ghost

The best New Zealand albums of 2022

from Death Libido - the information your enemies don’t want you to know by Jeremy “Cosmo” Potts

Look, I don’t listen to everything. One album’s in here because it’s the only album anyone’s sent to me to review since I started this blog. Or ever, really. But I do hear, and hear about, a fair bit of stuff on the radio and the internet and from my friends and family. These were the best albums made in New Zealand in 2022 as far as I know right now, plus some of the others worth discussing.

Starting with Trees by Avantdale Bowling Club. Tom Scott has written some of the best songs ever in this country, I was fortunate enough to hear the lot of them driving Sage around when he was a young scallywag, and Tom’s skill has only increased on Trees, but yet I haven’t really gotten into it – I’m just out of sympathy with dour social realism and retro jazz stylings at present, I’m looking for escapism and post-everything modernism. I do like that Trees uses trap beats on a song or two, and that Tom even gives autotune a go, so that the most important musical shift since hip hop finally got noticed by a star here, but I find myself drifting over to Trapping In The Summer by Stallyano and K.KILA. Cheating a bit because this is 2023 music, and I only lucked into it – no one in my feed is supplying a guide to this music - and really have no idea if it’s top shelf or not because that mainly doesn’t matter at present.* It’s a lush, rounded sound I can lose myself in, with well-blended rap-singing and warily escapist lyrics. K.LILA’s solo work is more introspective and existential, with sadder, equally beautiful backings; “When It Rains It Pours” is quite literally existential, he’s telling us his reasons for hanging on to this life. And he’s sharing his escapes, “weed and Hennessy”, a drink that turns up in thousands of trap songs, and you could call that a cliché, but to me it feels like the fulfilment of a ritual, a link to those who went before. Trap at its best, the fancy-funeral drumming, the easy, but inverted-so-not-so-obvious, changes, the sing-song autotune chorus, and the bass that gives under its own weight, whatever the lyrics are doing to you, empathically feels your pain and pours the balm of radical acceptance over it. Making it the music of our zeitgeist, the soundtrack to our existential limitations of work, area code, class, addictions, internet hate, media manipulation, climate change and the other apocalypse riders, mental health, mortality… this aspect of trap music gives its manifold other pleasures a Masque Of The Red Death quality that feels right for 2023.

I was sent an unsolicited album by Andrew O’Connell, Tungsten Hearts Club by the Christchurch-based Pavlov’s Puss, and against the odds I didn’t hate it. O’Connell sings in an Amphetamine Dylan style, and Dylan in his Cate Blanchett period was someone who really brought the toxicity essential to meaningful rock performance. Nor is the Amphetamine Dylan style played out. Mouse And The Traps and the Velvet Underground recorded some great homages in the 60’s, but few others really got its essence; certainly none of the “new Dylan” singer-songwriters. Add propulsive lead playing from new member Joe Sampson and a decent selection of mostly original songs (there’s a beautiful Grant Hart song on Tungsten Hearts Club, and Grant Hart’s work with Husker Du was some of the best of its era. “Sorry Somehow” and “Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely” should be playing in your head as you read this) and you get what’s got to be a satisfying live act, with an garage rock album you may well enjoy.

And here follow the top 3 NZ 2022 albums as I heard them, the happy few that have stood playing over and over again in our house and car.

I’ve always been relatively cold to the merits of Aldous Harding’s music prior to Warm Chris apart from “The Barrel”, and that hasn’t really changed, but I fell in love with this album the first time I heard a song from it, probably “Passion Babe”. It’s a record that radiates happiness and cleverness in a kind of musical and linguistic wonderland and its smoothly twisted idiom reminds me of the melodic, playful end of British 60’s folk; records like 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion and Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith, as well as Neil Innes’s arrangements for the Bonzo Dog Band. Aldous Harding’s singing is amusingly varied, often a pleasure and always interesting, and a series of vocal character impressions lead us across the lazily erotic Fever with its slowed snare, the aching fragility of the title track, the skipping latinesque syncopations of Lawn, the sly mockery of Tick Tock, the varied delight that’s every track on Warm Chris. Aldous is on record as saying that she wants her lyrics to stay as obscure as Neil Young’s, and maybe they are, but she seems to express every emotion and many passing thoughts even so, and I think they would stand up in a court of law. I know that this is music approved by the managerial class for its own consumption, in a way that very little else I want to listen to is, but it’s good.

P.H.F. are one of the acts Poppy used to play in the days when she asked us to pass her the aux, and I’d like it and ask what it was and get told “P.H.F” maybe twenty times for the same song, a well-written lo-fi thing but nowhere near as impressive or distinctive as Purest Hell. First heard at random on BFM, I was instantly attracted to this album by its production, finally a local record that sounds fully cosmopolitan, from someone who knows how to use up-to-date rhythms and vocal effects, but I wasn’t prepared for how much emotion there is, how well the songs and their sounds convey the anguish and sweetness of remembrance. Purest Hell is dedicated to Reuben Winter who died in 2020 and what for me perfects it as an act of remembrance is Joe Locke’s decision to swathe these sorrowful, upset rock songs in bubbly, candy-coloured synth patterns, soften (or demonize, for this is Purest Hell and nor are we out of it) his voice with autotune effects, and throw in abruptly skittering double-speed drums like the rapid cycling of a breaking heart, all of which reminds me of the Japanese gothic style of hyperpop balladry best exemplified by producer-singer 4s4ki, e.g. “I LOVE ME”. It’s a sound that’s the perfect setting for Purest Hell’s themes of grief and remembered joy, like the Japanese film that reminds us that there’s nothing sadder than a beautiful ghost. I’m also reminded of the Orpheus myth, indeed the first track is surely set to deter the wrong listener, with its needlessly flippant guitar riff intercut with full-on noise. Once past this Cerberus, the album proper starts; the obvious highlights are “Skincare” and “Sabbath Shirt”** (both featuring fantasyluv as guest vocalist) but there are many other songs to treasure and even the scouring instrumental “Baiter Cell” is very much the right thing dropped in the right place. Nor does the writing – strong and often slinky musical structures reminiscent of Goodshirt if anything local - really depend on that magical production – I’ve heard “Skincare” played live on an acoustic guitar and it’s the same beautiful lament.

Hopefully I’ll lose my grip
Maybe it will be today
Somehow ways I’m always if
I just want be okay
This year can’t get worse enough
Tip toe round and find your way
All my prayers aren’t good enough
I just want them to be okay

Just imagine what you’d do
But I can’t do it with you
Pull the car up to the back
Keep it secret cut the slack

The digital deconstructions of natural and synthetic timbres on Purest Hell and on most of the great overseas 2022 albums, from Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B to Rosalia’s Motomami, remind me of that Sigmund Freud saying “we fetishize what we can no longer take for granted” which already explains so much else. The sounds of fluff on the needle, tape wobble, surface noise, bass speaker blowout, wrong speed playback, CD skip, and whatever it is that happens to the wait music on call lines – these unwanted defects of analogue recording and playback have now been replicated selectively as objects of beauty by all the best producers in the most advanced studios to seduce their listeners, including those too young to have known their dispiriting originals. Which is modern wizardry and base element alchemy and not to be sneezed at. But it can be done equally well on the cheap, and this is what Dunedin’s Jeremy “Cosmo” Potts (Rackets, Coyote) supplies under the name Frog Power with Chicken Necks (For Rope).

Potts is a talented cartoonist, his songs have a comic book energy – their embattled viewpoint reminds me of The Who’s “Substitute” and “I’m A Boy” – and his life on record is that of the immature rock’n’roll outlaw (the Cosmo Potts account is my best Youtube follow by far). Yet when Cosmo cuts out a guitar solo his choice of notes makes me green with envy, there’s no missing the top-drawer musicianship when it peeps out from under the rubble. “Shouldve Stayed Home”, which rocks like a bobble-head dog in the rear window of a ute going the ton down a loose metal road, tells the day-in-the-life story of a chap who can’t leave the house without being cancelled or accosted, including a hilarious freestyle representative interaction. Chicken Necks is overflowing with what we used to call “an attitude”, the sort of rock’n’roll attitude that everyone here pretends to have but none of us, bar a chosen sacrificial few, can really afford. Least of all Frog Power, who compensates for a lack of major label backing by overproducing Chicken Necks on a shoe-string budget. Like, I don’t know if that’s a bootlegged autotune program or the bit of toilet paper in a kazoo that I’m hearing but it’s perfect for the tuneful hooks in this raw and rugged rock in the same way that P.H.F’s treatments are for their thing, and it has much the same effect, of pushing up the energy and embodying the pain – because Chicken Necks, like Purest Hell, involved its author enduring the loss of a loved one, in this case the recent loss of Jeremy’s younger brother, and Coyote partner in crime, Louis. The album opens with the catchy, defiant “Tears In The Night”, in which “I can’t think straight man, my mind’s all twisted up like a pretzel”; defiant humour, wistful surrealism, and the Dadaist threat of cultural vandalism are his medicine.

My eyes roll to the back of my head whenever I hear that some young New Zealand academic has recorded another respectful dissertation on their parents or grandparents’ record collection. I’ve heard that shit, you know I love it too, but it’s 2023 and I need to hear music by orphans and drop-outs, musicians obsessed by internet novelties or the dodgy music of their early teens. In the case of the 30-something Cosmo, this latter is going to be nu metal, rap metal, shock rock and lo fi hip hop – all that good Woodstock 99 stuff. The key to this on Chicken Necks is a track called “Juggalo Wine”, with a lo fi rap swing reminiscent of the sound Beck appropriated from the Butthole Surfers, punctuated with weird melodic bridges. The lyrics, as far as I can decipher, place the Juggalo community in South Dunedin, and seem aspirational. What follows is some documentation of “my research”. I knew that Juggalos are Insane Clown Posse fans, but my one Neil Strauss book only had an interview with Slipknot, who to my ancient mind were kind of similar, so I read it and found that the singer had this one-off side project called To My Surprise, who made one self-titled album (some shit-hot tracks, less extreme overall than Slipknot, stands the test of time) and the first track on it reminded me of the formula used on “Juggalo Wine”. I also learned that Slipknot fans are called maggots, that Insane Clown Posse and Slipknot had some brief and probably pointless feud, and that fans of both bands are called Maggalos. I’m calling it, I think Cosmo is a Maggalo. I can maybe apply this logic to help me understand another track, the surrealistic “Help I’m A Horse” but it doesn’t explain a rather perfect Country Teasers cover. Not everything needs to be explained. Some things just have to be experienced in all their rugged and glorious righteousness.

footnote flats

* As long, that is, as it’s not as bland as the made-to-measure faux-trap sounds I hear on local state funded TV, in comparison with which the 90 Day Fiancé faux-trap soundtrack is a masterpiece. Beats without bass won’t take you far. Which reminds me that I first heard those beats on Keeping Up With The Kardashians in January 2015 and my first thought was, they’ve ripped off Luke Haines’ “The Spook Manifesto” (2001).

** With a similar theme to “I Love My Leather Jacket”. Don’t get the wrong idea – neither P.H.F. nor Frog Power is “dark” listening, not that I would mind, neither wants to withhold comfort, and neither’s idiom is as depressing as, say, americana or EDM.

Algorithm Ugolead - Hammond Fu by King Loser