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Friday, June 15, 2007
YOU'RE ONLY LEAVING HURT
 Video
SCRAPBOOK
Dimmer
There My Dear
Warner Music New Zealand : 2006
[Buy it]
BBC WORLD
SUN OF GOD
David Kilgour
The Far Now
Merge : 2007
[Buy it]
I don't listen to too much Weepy White Guy music these days. For one - like playing wiffleball or using coupons at McDonalds - it just doesn't seem like something a man should be doing in his 30s. But also, surprisingly, my tolerance to it has become more sensitive with age. When immersed in emo-angsty poignancy of certain tones and frequency, my brain becomes like some simple-celled organism suspended in a biological medium that scientists are running an electric current through: helplessly without control, just a big twitching, embarrassing reflex. (Which reminds me, as I type it, of a mom, a mom of a certain size, a size that pantyhose copywriters might describe as "Queen-Plus," who I saw pushing a cart through the aisle of a low-income mega-mart the other week. She was a really big woman and she had a really big cart, like Ikea-furniture-cart big, and it was entirely filled with soda and nothing but soda, of all hue and literage. I wasn't judging her. If anything I felt a little envy. After all, isn't sugar water the one great redeeming perk of poverty? I felt like a 98 pound donkey, there with my flip-flops and bourgeois protein.)
So I don't listen to much WWG, but when I do, I'm fiercely loyal about it. I was quite sweet on the NZ rock band Straitjacket Fits in the early 90s, and ever since have kept tabs on its former frontman, Shayne Carter. Sometime in the very late 90s, Carter had Sony deliver some sort of studio recording pod to his New Zealand farm, like a plastic Pro Tools yurt, and he shut himself away, alone, for months, and immersed himself monastically in its circuits. As a musical experiment, it was akin to that movie Altered States, except with more purpose and less full-frontal nudity. He emerged with a brand new sound, something that achieved some kind of vivid electro-stupor. That sound became I Believe You Are A Star, the debut album by Carter's band Dimmer. It holds some pretty godlike activities. Especially "Under The Light" [download] and "Smoke" [download]. These songs move like the blood of a man who is 10 years into his career as an MTA night-shift train operator, and 15 years into his heroin addiction.
Dimmer's follow up record, You've Got To Hear The Music, was still had an electronic measure, but with more of a pop feel. It won awards and was okay, in the way Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" won awards and was okay. For their latest, There My Dear, Carter goes way way back to the old Fits formula. Guitar driven, melancholy but muscular. Though the standout is a downbeat one: "You're Only Leaving Hurt." If early Dimmer sounds, as Carter once very coolly described it, like "Sly Stone dying on the mic," then this song might sound like "Elvis drinking alone at the pub." The way Carter gets all up in your brain often reminds me of my WWG idol, Matt Johnson, especially so on an agro-angst track like "Scrapbook." This album was recorded mostly live in the community hall of the Grey Lynn Bowling Club. Only in New Zealand kids, only in New Zealand.
Carter's fellow Kiwi, David Kilgour, also has a new album in release. Kilgour, who led famed NZ rock band The Clean oh so many years ago, seems to have a much sunnier outlook these days than his countrymate. Maybe it comes from not isolating himself in techno pods. You could argue that just living in New Zealand is an isolating act in itself, but I reckon the isolation of open spaces is a different kind of isolation. A kind that empties you out, and makes it really difficult for you to continue stashing your introversions like soda in a cart.Labels: indie, James, NZ
posted by James
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