new zealand

Every Record I Own: Coolies – Master

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Every Record I Own: Coolies – Master

The other day I was walking through town and suddenly had ‘searching the night/searching the night/running from you/running from you’ stuck in my head out of nowhere. I found the release on bandcamp and listened to it on the way home.

This LP had been relegated to my difficult listening crate which doesn’t come out often. I think I last put it on a few years ago telling my flatmates it was a pop punk band and being asked to put it away after a few songs.

Coolies are a pop punk band. But maybe only for 5 minutes total out of this 35 minute record. And even when they are it’s in a ‘punk songs that are hooky’ way and not in the ‘2002 music on a discman at intermediate’ way.

Coolies were kind of a legendary band in my later teen years. In a music scene that was very male and even more white, a punk band of Māori women from South Auckland was something completely different. They did world tours and were loved by iconic musicians. They were described in the way that young women making punk music often are, bratty etc which is not true but appealed to me. And the fact that I only ever had one song of theirs to go by, Holiday/Vacation, on an A Low Hum compilation made them mysterious but within reach. Rumours of more songs on self released CDs that friends of friends had kept me interested.

But their live shows were few and far between and definitely not in Christchurch. There were rumours that Pumice aka Stefan Neville was now drumming for them, which apparently was very cool for those who knew who he was (not me at the time)

In 2010 seemingly out of nowhere a new album popped up. The artwork was black and white and had the aesthetics of a zine. It didn’t have their name on the front or anything. Still very cool and kinda mysterious.

I helped them put on an all ages show in Christchurch. They were real nice and very good live! They offered me a free record, but as I didn’t really listen to records at the time, and I wanted to listen to this I chose a CD instead, which I regretted for years until a friend sold me his copy.

I have now come back around on the idea that CDs are cool and if I knew where my copy of Master was on CD I would probably listen to that sometimes.

The first three tracks on Master could lead into a more conventional DIY punk record.

Tracks 1 and 3 Lets Pretend and Salute are both under 1 minute 30. Very hooky vocals lead by Tina but frequently Sjionel in tandem, clean guitar, bass and drums gel together. The only hint of anything especially weird is some of the production seems to red line and distort a bit easily, and occasionally the guitar leads become something non musical.

Wedged between them is Ghostbaby. Ghostbaby could be a pop song. It is structured verse/chorus/instrumental break/verse/chorus/fake fade out/verse/chorus. Except it has no regular guitar (just feedback and noise). drums and bass and a pulsating synth and the instrumental break completely breaks the song before the synth pulsates and picks the song back up. But even this doesn’t feel like it’s out of place and anything that would feel out of place on another record could be explained as being unintentional or as a result of struggles with DIY production.

After the third track there is no plausible deniability that this is anything but what the Coolies want it to be.

I’ve played guitar for a long time and never been very good at it, because whenever I play for any length of time I realise it’s much more fun making weird noises, creating rhythms and melodies out of the most non musical sounds you can make out of the guitar. The rest of the A side is made up of moments like this but on a full band level and far more interesting than anything I can do.

Sometimes the appeal of bands is the feeling that everything could fall apart at any moment. It creates a feeling of tension and a propulsion. With Coolies, it’s the potential that at any stage this chaos could come together into something amazing. And they do. In Throwaway the song explodes into the band playing around a guitar solo for a few seconds.

On the b side there are moments of convention. In Theory and Holiday are two of the most songy songs. They’re longer than 2 minutes (but less than 3) built on the traditional guitar/bass/drums vocals and hooky vocals but the noise, or the possibility of noise, never disappears completely.

Searching opens the B side and is the song that popped into my head the other day. It starts with call and response vocals over a drum beat and blooping electronics. Stefan Neville’s response vocals are distorted in a very pumice way. But that vanishes into a breakdown of shouting ‘you don’t understand, you’ll never understand‘ which gets yelled faster and faster until it’s almost percussive. The drums repeat this carrying the message forward wordlessly. Other instruments join in. On the last track on the album this beat comes back briefly and you can feel ‘you don’t understand, you’ll never understand‘ in the music.

I don’t love every part of this album Some of the lo fi noise jams go on a bit long for my current tastes. One of the downsides of records is you can’t easily skip these things, If it was an EP with just Lets Pretend/Ghostbaby/Salute/Message/Holiday it would likely be in my regular listening more often. But then I wouldn’t have Searching pop up in my head every now and then and have the need to listen to it. Or the moment in Throwaway with the out of nowhere 5 second guitar solo, or the moment in throwaway 30 seconds later with the 10 second guitar solo.

If you’re into the noisier side of things, their next album Kaka from 2015 leans into that further.

If you’re more into the songs but find the noise a bit difficult, Tina’s other band Piece War does a more stripped back focussed songs with just guitar/voice/drums

Uncollected singles and songs were rereleased as ‘South Auckland Girls in the Garage’ on by Thurston Moore in 2019, but has sold out and not available digitally. Some of the songs are floating around on Bandcamp including more straight up versions of Holiday/Vacation and Throwaway (which sounds like a completely different song) on a 2 track EP Bless the Babies and the Mothers and their 1999 7″ release. Their 2003 album is not anywhere online as far as I can tell.

Master has a bit of everything from the different eras of the band. It has some of their poppiest moments and some of their whatever the opposite of pop is moments. It has come out of my difficult listening crate for now.

I really hope that there are some teenagers somewhere who have heard the rumours of this amazing punk band, having listened to what they can find online, but knowing there’s something else out there waiting for them to tour again.

fave tracks: Searching (but only sometimes), Ghostbaby, Salute, Let’s Pretend, Holiday

Every Record I Own: The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

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Every Record I Own: The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

Elly got me this album for our anniversary. She was on a 2 month walk in Australia and the morning of our anniversary I got a message from her saying to check behind my copy of Michael King’s History of New Zealand and there was a packet of lollies and a card saying she had pre-ordered it for me! I don’t often pre-order albums so it was quite a safe present, but The Beths were doing a competition to win a guitar or a pair of headphones if you pre-ordered so I was planning on doing it, so was lucky that I hadn’t before that day. Then Elly won the pair of headphones from the competition anyway and she gave them to me too. Elly has asked me to not write about her, but I want to say that she is a really really great girlfriend.

There was always a risk that the Beths would never be able to live up to the magic of their first album (which I will come to here sometime). Their second album (which will also feature here) didn’t quite match it, but with Expert in a Dying Field they have made something that features what was amazing about their first album, but also brings something new to the band. Songs like Silence is Golden and Best Left sound completely different to anything they’ve done before (I can’t listen to Best Left on headphones because the stereo effects make me feel woozy, but it sounds great in a room. This is an issue I have with albums from Dimmer and Low as well which will show up. ), while 2am improves on the dream pop elements of Jump Rope Gazers.

The lyrics in Expert in a Dying Field make me feel very strong feelings. Being able to express something that is so widely felt in a brand new way is really impressive. It reminds me of this poem by Hera Lindsay Bird, which explores a similar but much nicer version of knowing someone so well.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was to end up as their biggest song.

I’ll come back to them a couple more times so I’ll save more for then. The Beths deserve all their hype.

Fave songs: Expert in a Dying Field, Silence is Golden, If told you I was afraid

Every Record I Own: Local Tourist – Other Ways of Living

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Every Record I Own: Local Tourist – Other Ways of Living

I bought this album last year after only listening a couple of times. It was released by Melted Ice Cream, a Christchurch record label run by an old friend of mine, and another old friend played bass and recorded it.

Erin Umstead lived in Christchurch for a few years but had to move back to the US because of visa issues, and this album was recorded in the few days before she had to leave.

Everything is recorded incredibly beautifully, and sounds very polished, so this is quite surprising. But it shows how polished the band must have been ahead of recording.

The opening riff sets a precedent for the album which holds true throughout. Spacious guitar, wet with reverb and tremolo. The bass syncs in with the guitar seamlessly, sounding less like a driving rhythm section and more like a natural occurrence. Breathy vocals and brushed snare drums round out the sound.

It’s all very pretty, but somewhat deceptively. It’s louder more complex than you initially realise. It’s easy to fall into it and let it flow over you. The songs don’t distinguish themselves from each other much. The tempo stays pretty similar, the tone constant, and there’s a drone that hangs around from the reverb. The vocals melodies are reasonably similar and they blend into the rest of the music very naturally. The album feels very cohesive and sure of itself, but without listening intentionally it can sort of float by.

There are however a handful of moments that draw your attention in. When Erin sings Huh Huh in I am Water, one of the album’s stand out tracks, my ears prick up. It swells naturally out of the pretty lull which leaves you questioning where it came from.

Dark, the album’s closing track is also a stand out. There’s a more conventional chord progression driving the song forward. The drums use a lot more toms and less brushes and a tremolo’d guitar loop takes up the high frequencies replacing the feedbacky drone that has been constant in the rest of the album. Erin’s vocals don’t sink into the music like they do in the other songs, but stand over them. They are not dissimilar but feel more confident. It’s a really nice way to end an album.

I’d say this has been one of my most listened to albums of the year, despite not knowing it anywhere near as well as some of my others.

One downside is that it is on clear vinyl, which makes it so hard to see the groves between the songs, so when I was playing records at the Sprig the other day, I had to play side one track one (Colors) rather than the intended track (Dark) because I couldn’t find it in time. I’m personally a fan of black vinyl, but coloured is all good. Clear and white are the only two I don’t like. (I just checked on bandcamp and there is a black vinyl version of this too, but the record store I got it from only had the clear)

Fave tracks: Colors, I am Water, Dark

Every Record I Own: Peter Jefferies: The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World

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Every Record I Own: Peter Jefferies: The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World

Peter Jefferies is likely the artist that plays on the most records in my collection. He was the drummer in every Dunedin band around 1990. I have records from his earlier bands with his brother, a bunch of his solo stuff. He also produced a lot of the Xpressway records work from that era. In my early 20s I was a massive fan, which was only amplified by the mystery of him giving up music in the early 2000s, returning to his small home town in Taranaki and never appearing again.

This is his first solo record, and maybe the best thing her ever did?

Back when I listened to a lot more challenging music on a regular basis, I considered this album quite… beautiful. The type of easy to listen to thing I could (and did) put on at a chill afternoon board games hang out.

That really shows a. how depressed I was b. the patience of my friends and c. the big change to my music listening habits over the last 5 or so years. Because this album is quite an uncomfortable experience.

I can see why I thought it was more easy listening than it is. There’s a song which is a cappella except for the sound of someone making a cup of tea in the background.

Most of the songs don’t have loud distorted guitar (except there are some songs that definitely do) and they’re not heavy or rocky in a traditional way. Most the songs are built out of piano lines, which has generally been an instrument I associate with ‘nice gentle’ music.

But the piano lines repeat endlessly, occasionally signalling a hopefulness, but more frequently a whirlpool-esque downward suction. and the lower chords act like a kick drum, holding the beat and pushing the song forward.

There’s also the typical use of hiss and noise and backwards guitars that pop up in every Xpressway adjacent 4 track recording from the era. There’s a low frequency throb or hum through the album, which often occurs in lo-fi tape recorded music, which has disappeared in most modern production.

His slow deep (baritone? bass? idk) vocals add a calmness, albeit a sad one.

There is a convincing argument that Fate of the Human Carbine is one of the best ever songs to come out of New Zealand. It’s about a sad life of a sad man that is expressed perfectly through it’s lyrics and music. Peter Jefferies sings almost monotone over a droney finger picked guitar, while other instruments (piano, guitar, mandolin(?)) pop up one at a time over to add a couple of bars of emotional weight, to the otherwise apathetic feel of the song. Towards the end of the song a distorted guitar taking the secondary instrument position and completely overwhelming the droney guitar.

It has been covered by Cat Power (cool) and Amanda Palmer (…) but Peter Jefferies version is the best imo.

Amanda Palmer did convince him to come out of retirement/isolation, which led to him touring and me seeing him perform so I will spontaneously stand up and applaud her for that.

Songs such as Fate of the Human Carbine could easily be enjoyed by a wider audience, and compared to a band like the Dead C it is quite accessible, but it is more of an uncomfortable listen than I remembered it being.

I still love this record, but I can’t imagine it coming back into my super regular rotation again anytime soon. I’m less likely now to put on music that makes me feel so uncomfortable on a day to day basic. And I wouldn’t put my flatmates or friends through that like I was willing to in the past. But it’s an album that I’ll come back to every six months or so when I’m alone and I hope that I’ll be able to keep seeing those beautiful things in it that I did in my early 20s.

Every Record I Own: Glass Vaults – Sojourn

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Every Record I Own: Glass Vaults – Sojourn

The backyard is of the best things about my house. It gets lots of sun but has areas with shade. Has a picnic table. There’s a little courtyard and a lawn. We just mowed the lawns the other day and tidied up so outside is quite nice at the moment especially.

My old flatmate wired up some speakers that sit under the back door awning. They’re nice speakers that point directly to where you sit.

This morning I sat out on the picnic table, drank a coffee and polished my shoes and listened to this record. It was so nice and I thought this moment should be documented.

I think this is the best sitting in the sun and drinking coffee record I own.

I’ll come back to Glass Vaults again.

Fave tracks: Life is the Show, Sojourn, Come and be Beautiful