Update!

I know it's been a frustrating past few weeks here and I wanted to give you all an update. A few days ago while installing the new Mac OS Snow Leopard by computer's HD totally bit the dust. Unfortunately I will need to get a completely new HD before I'll be up and running again so expect this blog to have no activity for at least the next week / week and a half. The good news is that all of my music is backed up. See you soon!

The Fall - In-A-Hole (Live in NZ 1982)

This live document from an Auckland, New Zealand gig in 1982 gained notoriety more from its rare status than its quality as a live recording featuring the group in all their menacing pre-Brix era glory. The band is mostly tight, though the drumming gets a bit ropey in places, but perfection was never the Fall's reason for being. "Room to Live," "Fantastic Life," "No Xmas for John Quays," and "The Classical" are all delivered with a fury by Smith, who uses live gigs to extend and improvise on the themes outlined in the studio versions. A few rarities -- "Backdrop" and "Solicitor in Studio" -- made this worth picking up for the more than casual fan. The album was shoddily released on CD in 1997 by Cog Sinister, mastered apparently from a dusty copy of the original vinyl, skips included.

Peter Jefferies - The Last Great Challenge In A Dull World (1995)

Jefferies' full solo debut features his return to vocals. It also presents one of the most amazing collections of New Zealand musicians around to assist him; the guest list practically reads like a combination of the Flying Nun and Xpressway rosters, with Bruce Russell, Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull, Robbie Yeats, and Michael Morley being just some of the participants. This is still Jefferies' album all the way, though. The fantastic job he does with it is a wonder, working his unique blend of indirect fierceness and restrained passion, lyrically and musically, to newer heights. His piano playing and drumming understandably take pride of place here, as does his unusual speak-singing baritone (though sometimes this crops up in different contexts than before). "Domesticia," for instance, features him singing an a cappella rumination as various kitchen and household noises rattle and clash around him. Perhaps his most moving composition ever (and one of the few on the album he does entirely by himself), "On an Unknown Beach," features just him and his piano, revisiting the darker impulses of his This Kind of Punishment days, but here with a strong, new emotionalism and a finely honed sense of moody beauty. His penchant for tape manipulation and inventive production remains strong throughout; "The House of Weariness" is particularly striking on this point, as heavily flanged vocals from Jefferies play over a calm piano line while other odd noises and vocals appear and disappear almost randomly. The Ajax reissue adds the contemporaneous "Fate of the Human Carbine" single that Jefferies recorded with Robbie Muir as a bonus; its gentle, brooding tension and the almost-rollicking guitar crunch "Catapult" on the flipside further add to the appeal of this excellent album.

KIWI WEEK

I think it's fair for anyone to accuse me of slacking off a bit for "Kiwi Week". Unfortunately some real life stuff got in the way and prevented me from having as much free time as I originally anticipated. Kiwi Week will continue through this week and then we will return to our regularly scheduled programming.

If you have any submissions for Kiwi week, please contact me at decrepittapes (AT) gmail (dot) com

Able Tasmans - A Cuppa Tea and a Lie Down (1987)

A major work from this New Zealand indie group, A Cuppa Tea and a Lie Down comes highly recommended to those in love with the sophisticated and delicate arrangements of the New Zealand rock scene's Flying Nun label sound. While some of their peers in the productive period of '80s and '90s down under produced edgy, loud guitar music inside the framework of pop, Able Tasmans temper their largely acoustic sound with keyboards and acoustic arrangements in place of corrosive guitars. The songs are built on the delicate threshold of complexity/simplicity, filled out with lush arrangements and dreamy atmospheres that call to mind Fairport Convention. A great album filled with sweet and crafty pop songs that will hold much appeal to fans of intelligent guitar pop; Yo la Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, the Bats, and Television Personalities spring to mind.

Cyclops - Goat Volume (1992)

Bringing together the talents of Peter Jefferies on drums and vocals and Kathy Bull on bass, vocals and guitar, along with guitarist/singer Bruce Blucher and singer/keyboardist Andre Richardson, Cyclops produced this one fine album mostly taken from a series of sessions in 1991 and 1992. Unsurprisingly each performer brings something from their own particular backgrounds in New Zealand underground rock, together resulting in a casual but not lazy series of songs that sounds like it was good fun to perform. This said, much of the dank, crumbling sound of Kiwi experimentalism runs unsurprisingly rampant. Recording, often overseen by noted producer/engineer Steven Kilroy on four or eight track machines, is lo-fi well before that became a hip phrase, thick and rough, but with a passion that comes through on every note. "Lunar Fall," a wonderful number written and sung by Bull, is a great example; its soaring guitar would seem to demand U2-style production levels, but recorded in the lovely haze as it is, it sounds much more affecting as a result, her vocals just right as well. Blucher is the chief songwriter and singer for the line-up, but everything much more like a collaboration than simply an interpretation of other's work, such is the feeling of the songs. When the various members experiment with other instruments, such as Bull's mandolin on "Gurgie Throat" or Blucher's ragged trumpet on, unsurprisingly, "Fallen Golden Trumpets," the results are even more effective, adding more variety to the low-key flow of the album. Other highlights include the Richardson/Blucher duet on "Steel White Bed," with another beautiful guitar line and crush in the background of the mix, and the no-percussion-needed "Spolcyc," with all members but Bull present and using keyboards and guitar to create the soundtrack to a gruesome spoken word tale.

Sombretones - S/T EP (1990)

The only release of a very short lived band that featured Graeme Jefferies on guitar. The real winner on the album is "Good Evening Listeners" which is the track that the band is most recognized for. Pretty standard jangly kiwi-rock that's not at all unlike The Chills' early material.

Toy Love - S/T (1980)

Toy Love was a New Zealand alternative/punk rock band fronted by Chris Knox. Other members were guitarist Alec Bathgate, bass player Paul Kean, drummer Mike Dooley, and keyboard player Jane Walker. The band developed out of the earlier punk band The Enemy in Dunedin, New Zealand, and are often regarded as the progenitors of the Dunedin Sound movement.

Dadamah - This Is Not A Dream (1995)

While Dadamah is often seen as another step along the way in the artistic path of Roy Montgomery, he'd be the first to agree that does a disservice to his equally talented bandmates. Singer/bassist Kim Pieters writes the fascinating if sometimes hard to read liner notes for this complete career overview, while there's also keyboardist/backing vocalist Janine Stass as well. Together the trio continued the by-then well-established Kiwi underground music tradition of shadowy, haunting music and production, helped by noted figure in said scene Peter Stapleton, who also took care of drumming as needed. Unless the consistently aggro noise fests of, say, the Dead C or Gate, Dadamah also draw on a generally more spare but no less compelling approach, often building up arrangements and then settling back again, or else maintaining a continuing steady, gently addictive pace. There's the roots of Montgomery's work in the Pin Group, naturally, with its own echoes of Joy Division and early Cure, but there's also a very strange, folky vibe as well that at points suggests the work done half a world away by Dave Pearce in Flying Saucer Attack. Both Pieters and Montgomery's singing draws on the more idiosyncratic post-punk approach to vocals, eschewing technical skill in favor of just getting it out. Whether it's Pieters' higher, sometimes wailing approach or Montgomery's stern, strained and reflective singing, though, words and music almost always go very well together throughout. Stass' keyboard work, meanwhile, adds even more of a strange, odd edge to proceedings. Sometimes the tone is almost a bit jaunty, as the swinging skip and burbling keyboard notes of the lengthy "Too Hot to Dry," sung by Pieters, shows, even with the usual murky production style. With highlights like the Montgomery-sung "High Tension House," where the title phrase comes from, and the truly tripped, Pieters-sung "Radio Brain," This is Not a Dream is well worth investigating.

Roy Montgomery - 324 E. 13th Street #7 (1999)

This CD collects all six of Roy Montgomery's solo singles -- until 1999 anyway -- a rare single from his band the Swallows in 1985, and four previously unreleased tracks. The Swallows' single had the word "legendary" written all over it when people here in the U.S. finally got hip to Montgomery as a solo artist. It was rated with his original Pin Group material and as being better than either Dadamah or Dissolve, his other group projects. They're pleasant tunes dealing with arty subjects and rather '60s-ish backing vocals. They do feature Montgomery's guitar style as already developed, and on "Trial by Separation," they present Montgomery's only known surf guitar solo. The rare tracks, including a demo single (production run: one copy) made from an art gallery wander called "Submerged and Colorful," is catchy even without drums, and a song from a poem written by his cousin ("Cousin Song") is compelling for its hypnotic acoustic guitar effect. Of the official "singles," "Film as a Subversive Art," "Just Melancholy," "Times Three," and "Strange Attractor" b/w "On the Road, No. 1" are the most compelling.