Some Sequels and a Prequel

New Musick Roundup!

The Reviewer Administers Justice

It’s the dea(r)th of music journalism, making it harder for you to stay informed of rad new shit and be entertained by the twists and turns of ‘critical thinking’ about it. In these New Dark Ages, there are models for how the few monkish chroniclers left can keep the faith in their hermetic chambers. The one that appears best to me is the blogger, on Substack or not, who presents a playlist of links and/or some news about scenes and artists that you’re not going to get elsewhere (unless of course it’s already on Elsewhere). The most relevant local follow for me is Chris Schultz at Boiler Room. Chris knows the music media landscape in NZ, keeps abreast of touring artists, and hears and likes new stuff from NZ and overseas.

And now for some New Music!

Last week Barry Adamson, recent subject of one of these columns, released the title track from his album Fade to Black, and, like ‘The Last Words of Sam Cooke’, it finds him at the top of his game, imagining the downfall of LA in a revolution which will be televised as the background to some noir erotic tryst (there’s a nod to Lou Reed in the lyric as well as that Gil Scott Herron one). I’m impressed by the way Adamson combines racial consciousness (his dad was Jamaican, his mum was English, and he played a supporting role in Nick Cave’s early minstrel act with the Bad Seeds) with noir notions of sexuality and danger. The high hit rate across Cut to Black confirms my sense that Adamson is having a creative peak. Read his book Up Above the City, Down Beneath the Stars (2022) if you haven’t already.

 


Over in Merrie England, Hayley met anti-Britpop auteur Luke Haines, discussed the prospects of re-releasing Pop. Lib. with him (he’s a fan of that first munted Puddle mini-album), at Rough Trade London and scored me a signed copy of his Freaks Out! Weirdos, Misfits and Deviants – The Rise and Fall of Righteous Rock ’n’ Roll, the very thing I most wanted in the whole of Europe. I’ve been reading this work to her bit by bit, and it’s as insightful and funny and perversely opinionated as one might expect if you’ve read the pissingly funny Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall, or its sequel, Post-Everything. Haines, I’m happy to learn early on in Freaks Out!, views the Doors as one of the truly important rock groups, just as I do, and even sees The Shadows as psychedelic precursors, which is not a million miles from my argument centering instrumental guitar bands, of whom the Shadows were Kings, in the birth of rock from the ashes of rock’n’roll. Along the way, Haines tells the parts of his own history that he left out of the preceding volumes, because everyone he canonizes as a Freak so far (we’re up to the chapter on Morrissey which is a stand-alone masterpiece), along with lesser beings like the vile Gary Glitter, betrayer of the noble Glitter Band, was an inspiration either in his early days or in his 21^st century career as a concept artist. Haines stands in a unique position as a critic, with a goodly amount of (artistically, at least) successful work behind him, yet so many self-inflicted failures that he has nothing to lose by speaking his mind, and he mercilessly uses his examples to diagnose the sickness at the heart of the modern music industry, the drastic consequences of the purging of Freaks (the yeast in the dough, since replaced by extra gluten) in favour of artists capable of safety and conformity.
Haines, however, slags off Fat White Family, and this I think is a strategic error (but Haines-as-General has shown himself to be a brilliant tactician with no strategy, the Rommel of whatever it is that he does), because their frontman Lias Saoudi is fighting much the same battle in his polemics, lamenting the lack of danger and strangeness and genuine non-conformism in modern music. Everything he writes is worth reading. Fat White Family’s past penchant for slick 80’s Bowie-esque funk arrangements, often monotonous to my ears, has tended to undersell what seem to be some mighty concepts and lyrics, but this is less of a problem on Forgiveness is Yours (2024), which goes in for atmospherics and intensity, and has tracks like Tam Saoudi’s terrifying memoir of his Algerian boyhood ‘Today You Become Man’, and the mighty ‘Feed the Horse’. There’s even something about the first track, ‘The Archivist’, that reminds me of – Luke Haines.

Steve Albini’s passing reminds me that he produced the most sonically impressive of the Auteurs albums (at the behest of Nirvana fan Luke Haines, who, like most of the people Albini worked with, became a lifetime friend) After Murder Park (1996), with great tracks like ‘Tombstone’ and ‘Light Aircraft on Fire’.

Rest in peace? Young Steve Albini faced down his fear by systematically offending the kind of people who'd tried to instill fear in him. This is the most dangerous existential ploy, compared to it extreme sports are tame. Albini worked it so well he eventually felt free to retract. But those kinds of people still exist. His ghost being put to rest on this side of the Unknown seems unlikely in the near future, so I say, Bring on the Bios.

‘Supernatural’ is a song I would have included in my Random Shards of Metal post had I known about it. I belong to a NZ Metal group on facebook and recently someone shared a live video of  Cult of Luna (described elsewhere as a “post-metal” band) performing Mariner, the album they recorded (2016) with vocalist Julie Christmas. There being too few female metal singers, in my opinion, I looked her up and found this stellar performance, ahead of an upcoming album, Ridiculous and Full of Blood. I know next to nothing about Christmas or her all-star band, except that her singing is a little Björky, never a bad thing, and this song is on fire. You can call this very catchy tune prog-metal or post-metal if you think that means anything, but I really, really want to be able to call it “pop” one day. Her 2010 album The Bad Wife is sounding great too.

Dave Graney is an Australian musician (Moodists, Coral Snakes), personality (he guested. as himself, on two episodes of Neighbours back in the day), and curator of cultural history. He not only interviewed me on his radio show Banana Lounge Broadcasting back in 2022, he played some of the new music I champion here on subsequent shows. A man of taste and some courage. He’s mentioned in Barry Adamson’s autobiography with appreciation for his skill in creating noir moods; if Hamish Kilgour was NZ’s last beatnik, Graney is Australia’s last beat poet, and the mighty ode to darkness that is ‘Night of the Wolverine’ has cemented his place in rock history. With long-time partner, drummer and collaborator Clare Moore, Dave made one of the better 2022 albums, In a MistLY, full of fine and snappy New Wave songwriting and droll meditations like ‘How can I be Old’ with its touching, killing line ‘a girl gave me her seat on a train today’.
Their new album (strangely​)​(​emotional) finds Dave digging deep into the hashish jar opened on the earlier Hashish/Liquor 2CD split collaboration with Moore to create some slower and woozier sketches, wherein he lets his voice wander around the tune in the way only an elder statesman can (Sinatra, Dylan). Single ‘I Said No to Myself’ (mixed by Adamson) captures Dave’s distinct vibe of mystery - why does he want us to feel this way? What is he saying? Why is it No? A partial answer came to me late last night, or early this morning – is Graney somehow able to bottle the sound, feel and transient intellectual struggle of our old friend, insomnia?

P.H.F. is a New Zealand-based act with a worldwide audience, one of those success stories (like Ulcerate within the Stygian realm of death metal) ignored by NZ media because their music doesn’t fit any of the parochial genres (country-pop, reggae, old-school rap, Dunedin sound, 90’s R&B).
Last year’s Purest Hell was one of the best albums of 2022 anywhere in the world, and I reviewed it in the early days of this blog. A follow-up has been on my “most-needed albums 2024” shortlist. It’s arrived in the shape of Load, and across a first few listens it’s every bit as brilliant, Joe Locke hasn’t departed far from the hardcore Pacific Rim hyperpop sound of Purest Hell, just refined and developed it further (but he’s expanded it to include the lovely witchhouse instrumental, ‘Torso’). Importantly, the song-writing is every bit as good, and to my ears is what anchors Load as Kiwi music; we’re still hearing someone who grew up on Goodshirt, Ed Cake and Bic Runga under all these exhilarating sonic wonders, someone who knows how to write a tune.

A follow-up to Mona Evie’s 2022 neo-psychedelic statement Chó Ng​ồ​i Đ​á​y Gi​ế​ng was also on my very short list of albums I really wanted from 2024, but I’ve learned that this won’t be happening while the group is in hiatus, with founding member aprxel putting her energies into her solo career, a decision which makes sense, and was kind of predictable, but for now takes a second Mona Evie album off the table. But the true fan, and for me Mona Evie was the Beatles example of what a group dedicated to the new sound, let’s call it post-pop psychedelia, could achieve in the way of sonic pleasures, wants something to take its place. If there is no album 2, are there demos and out-takes that can take its place for now? I wondered. Then, one day a search of SoundCloud turned up this recording of a live set (DJ Mix) recorded at ESS in 2021, which is the length of an album and contains just one track, ‘Len Don’, that would later appear on Chó Ng​ồ​i Đ​á​y Gi​ế​ng. And it’s great; we hear early singles like ‘Tập tô’ and aprxel’s AM/PM collaborations with Ly Trang (listed here as “Axa”) alongside raps and autotuned solos by various members, including producer-founder Pilgrim Raid, with some lovely backings, softer overall than their Chó Ng​ồ​i Đ​á​y Gi​ế​ng equivalents, interrupted by freestyle comedy sketches that are more full of character than of sense, wild guitar solos, incredible metallophone passages, and so on, in a fast-moving flow that gives us an intoxicating sketch for the wonders to come and a work that very much stands up in its own right, and that might well appeal to some listeners more than the totally brilliant but inconsistent and at times abrasive Chó Ng​ồ​i Đ​á​y Gi​ế​ng.

The track listing shows how Mona Evie at this stage were “more a legend than a band”, a collective of disparate talents, before they became, at times, a real band.

Here's a very recent clip featuring Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) to show us how a few minutes in the spotlight can made into so much more than a safe PR exercise.

Below this paywall, I’ve put a few comments on the state of music journalism in New Zealand. Three theories to account for its decline. Before posting, I applied the THINK criteria, which might help you judge whether to risk reading it.

Is it Thoughtful? What a Cartesian question. It took me long enough.
Is it Helpful? Not if you lot do nothing about it, no.
Is it - I forget what I stands for - Interesting? Incisive? Incendiary?
Is it Necessary? It shouldn’t have been, let’s put it that way.
Is it Kind? No, not really.