Music
Baroque dreams
by Nick Bollinger
Including The Overflow & Sweetacres.
The Abel Tasmans were an anomaly in the Flying Nun stable. They aimed for baroque pop rather than garage rock, and even when their execution didn’t measure up to their ambitions it made a change from trebly guitars. A decade after calling it quits, core Tasmans Graeme Humphreys and Peter Keen have regrouped to make an album that at last fulfils those baroque dreams.
And they have spared no expense, or else called in a lot of favours. Horns and string quartets augment a rhythm section centred on Humphreys’ keyboards, creating almost-symphonic settings for Peter Keen’s gorgeous white-chocolate voice. And the songs justify the extravagance. In an age when “melodic” has become shorthand for anything with more than one chord, here are tunes that truly soar. The strongest of them – “Bright Shining Star”, “Eyes of a Blue Dog”, “You Smiled” – bring to mind great pop symphonists like Jimmy Webb or Van Dyke Parks. And while the overall mood is romantic, it is also as quirky as you would expect from a pair who, in their other lives, are an oceanographer and a Radio Sport host.
After Toy Love, whose studio recordings never quite captured the perilous energy the group projected on stage, Chris Knox swore off studios to become a pioneer of low-tech home recording. A quarter-century later, when everyone else is making albums in their bedrooms, the perverse old bugger has gone back into a studio and, for the first time since Toy Love, employed a band.
The songs are misanthropic (“Great Big Puppy Eyes”), maudlin (“World Without a Sun”), mystical (“The Darkest Star”) and mischievous (“I Wanna Be Queer”). But drummer Stefan Neville and bassist Jol Mulholland bring dynamics and depth that Knox could not have achieved with his trusty four-track and tape loops. They even jam with Knox on a loose, bubbling boogie that sounds like a cheerful collision between early Brian Eno and late-period Beatles, appropriately titled “Happiness Is a Warm Jet”. More Beatleisms come in the form of live strings and horns (complete with “Penny Lane” trumpet trills on “Puppy Eyes”). But though the cover art pays further homage to the Fab Four, the personality that predominates in these tuneful cartoons is unmistakably that of Knox.
What do you do when you grew up in Avondale but your heart is in Tennessee? You write honky-tonk songs about your memories of suburban New Zealand – at least that is the solution of the Nudie Suits’ Mark Lyon. And it provides plenty of grist for the group’s second album. “Inheriting the Stereo”, about the time-honoured tradition of discovering a big brother’s record collection, is laugh-out-loud funny. And though Lyons’s faux-American twang should sound out of place in lines as classically Kiwi “that ol’ jube mixture’s easy to wipe off a ya sandals” or accounts of trips to “Mr Yogi’s dairy”, the Suits swing up a storm, especially steel guitarist Dionne Taylor, whose swooping solos provide their own cosmic commentary on Lyons’s lyrics. But in the end the hillbilly boogie is really just a foundation, onto which they graft everything from Beach Boys harmonies to stadium power chords and Polynesian strumming – sounds that complete a wry, nostalgic picture of a West Auckland childhood.
Warren Love signposts his influences with a couple of covers from classic country storytellers John Prine and Kieran Kane. But the marvel is how well the local material on his debut album stands up alongside that of these giants of the genre. In particular, Kevin Byrt and Barry Hennessey’s “Autographed Picture of Jesus” and Love’s own “Cow Jazz” work like the best kind of country songs; down-home narratives laced with homespun wisdom, sentiment tempered with humour. The other clincher is Love’s singing – intimate, imperfect and utterly believable. And producer Clinton Brown (Warratahs, Rockinghorse) frames the voice in warm woody arrangements that find room for cellos, accordions and the occasional Salvation Army band. Kiwi country with class.
THE OVERFLOW, Humphreys and Keen (Sweet Pea)
CHRIS KNOX & THE NOTHING (A Major)
SWEETACRES, The Nudie Suits (Lil Chief)
WARREN LOVE BAND, Warren Love Band (Elite)
