albums

Rip It Up, Issue 176, 1 March 1992, Page 24

albums

THE EXPONENTS Something Beginning With C (Polygram) So at last New Zealand's pub rock superstars return to the fray with a new album, and after hogging the chart with assorted singles and being all over the video shows, it had better be good. Well, fortunately for all involved, (especially those of us listening to the album) it is. Not 100 percentbrilliant, mind, but pretty damn good. Unsurprisingly most of the material here is bouncy singalongs like Who Loves Who The Mosf. Good, traditional Exponents fare this stuff, and a sound they do very well. There's no shortage of catchy riffs and Jordon has always had a nice line with the lovelorn verse, so all is well. Probably more impressive are the odd moments where the band stretch themselves a bit, a track like 'Erotic' shows they are capable of a real range of sound and emotion. Here the clipped rock guitars are replaced by some semi-psychedelic tones and the overall feel is quite dark and foreboding, a lot like the nastier moments on Amplifier. Where Something Beginning With Closes the thread is in the inclusion of tracks that really don't rate as much more than filler, the sort of studio jams that somehow evolved into songs when perhaps they should have been left as ideas.

Still, that is but a little grip when you consider that here is a really nice, clean sounding slab of indiginous pop. The sort of stuff you can scream along with in the front row of a concert, and happily listen to on a lazy Sunday afternoon. No frills, but lots and lots of class. KIRK GEE VARIOUS Getting Older (Flying Nun) This, the Flying Nun retrospective compilation, comes a little late for last year's 1 Oth Anniversary celebration, but that's not entirely out of character for a label which has, at times, outstripped the gestation period of a mother elephant. It's a tribute to the enduring quality of the records that the delay generally hasn't mattered too - much — to the punters, anyway. . So where do we find ourselves? Twenty tracks picked from a large and byzantine back catalogue, Getting

Older is a tale of hard choices. First, what's not there: no Children's Hour, Victor Dimisich Band (although the Terminals are in), Marie & The Atom, Builders (their only FN LP was the monumental Beatiin Hearts), Fetus Productions and a host of others. All excusable in the circumstances — but the absence of the Skeptics (and especially their luminous masterpiece 'Agitato/) really isn't. Amongst what has made it on board, an understandable tendency towards the obvious is offset by considerations about what's already been on compilations and the odd maverick choice, like the Bals' sweet, wistful 'Candidate', originally a B-side to 'Block of Wjod'. Bailter Space ('Skin'), Tall Dwarfs ('Crush'), Goblin Mix (Travelling Grave'), Snapper ('Budd/), JPS Experience ('Elemental'), Able Tasmans ('Sour Queen*) and most of the others are pretty well represented

by their selections. Nothing Stephen ever recorded was a particularly good example of David Kilgour's considerable talents and call me an old fogie, but gimme something off Look Blue Go Purple's debut EP over 'I Don't Want You Anywa/anyday. Some of the selections call up simpler, bygone times. 'Dialling A Prayer* is a reminder of days when there was no more riding on Straijacket Fits than a busted love affair, and the Chills first 7“ 'Rolling Moon' is a fizzing shot direct from Martin Phillipps' cocoon of youthful imagination. One track in particular (and in some ways it's the finest thing here) will never be repeated; Shayne Carter and Peter Jefferies' 'Randolph's Going Home' is simply extraordinary. Like 'Randolph', the full, functional track notes call up departed friends — and unlikely "studios* like the should-be-legendary Legion Of

Frontiersmen Hall and Paul Kean's old house in Christchurch. A thinkpiece from the considerable pen of St Roy Colbert would have been nice, but perhaps there wasn't room. Flying Nun's place in the cultural history of Aotearoa is already more than established — try to imagine pop life in NZ without it. But it has also, more than most people here realise, become the face of our country's music overseas. That means, perforce, things must change. The sense of community that made it all work, and reached its peak around the time of the Looney Tour, can't help but be eroded when some of the people on this album have international record deals and others are still getting their collars felt by Social Welfare.

Flying Nun is a different kind of label these days. It can't have the kind of comprehensive grasp onn local developments it used to, its roster now

looks more like a sector, rather than a reflection, of what's going on. It's still probably the finest label of its kind in the world. Can you think of another one? (American neo-redneck grunge labels need not apply). Cheers to everyone involved. So when's the compilation of the really weird stuff going to arrive then? RUSSELL BROWN SNAPPER Shotgun Blossom (Flying Nun) Peter Gutteridge has been around long enough to know that the Bad Lord never meant rock music to be real art, or "self expression", or some social phenomenon turning individual stupid Western teenagers into a stupid united force. He knows that its truest essence is a trick of the darkness, a supremely elegant, anti-social confidence trick; that all that matters is that you or I mistake the awesome, primitive beauty of his band's noise for our own power and thus momentarily feel better about our pathetic lives. Because he knows all this, he deals only in the most fleeting of Dark Sensations while family favourites like Martin Phillipps explain themselves to death with too many chords and pointlessly specific lyrics. Any elaboration of a title like 'Telepod Fl/ would enter the realm of sci-fi naffness, but with only a thermonuclear throb of guitar, keyboard and unintelligibly reverbed voice to speak for it, its associations of futuristic . escape and narcissistic solitude go on forever. If you need any more paraphrasing than that, observe that the song on Shotgun Blossom called 'Can' follows one on Gutteridge's solo tape called 'Suicide'. Snapper are as musically monstrous as the former, as superhumanly attitude-laden as the latter. Surrender to them now. MATTHEW HYLAND - <- SEVERED HEADS Bulkhead (Nettwerk) These least stereotypical of Australians (with the possible exception of some guy called Cave) now seem content to hang around the periphery of meta-house norms, so this compilation, stretching from 'BB back to 'B3, is a timely reminder that it wasn't always that way. While their contemporaries S.P.K. and, to a lesser extent, Cabaret Voltaire imagined a full-on techno-apocalypse, Severed Heads produced squeaky clean automated artefacts with built-in flaws: mutually exclusive pop tunes within single songs,

wildly skewed dynamics, spooky massed vocal undertows and titles like 'Harold and Cindy Hospital'. In those days that sort of music was supposed to be somehow politically allegorical; by that spurious logic Severed Heads might have been suggesting not only that industrial capitalism is headed for catastrophe, butthat even when everything's working perfectly something's wrong. Now, of course, we know that mechanized chess is simply fun to listen to MATTHEW HYLAND VARIOUS Closet Classics Vol 1 The More Protein Sampler (More Protein) When heroin and the failure of Culture Club brought George O'Dowd's career as an international pop star tumbling down around him, he returned from whence he came — London clubland. His clubbing pedigree was the perfect launching pad for his new venture — More Protein Records. George and his accomplices got it right almost straight away. E-Zee Posse's exuberant 'Everything Starts With An E' was circulating on white label in the earliest days of the acid house boom. It took another 1 8 months to become anything like a chart hit, setting the tone for a label which (right down to the cuddly religious tack on the sleeve) is about what clubbers, rather than radio programmers, like. MC Kinky, star of 'Everything', is a one-trick pony, but it's a good trick. 'lnna We Kingdom' is another energetic, infectious romp. George (as Jesus Loves You) croons delicately over a variety of chunky grooves and, on 'After The Love', a drum sound some people would sell their grannies for. But the real star is Eve Gallagher — 'Love Comes Down' and 'Love Is A Master Of Disguise' are solid gold UK club classics (and they shifted plenty units too). Only one track lets the side down — E-Zee Posse's The Sun Machine' which is made no more memorable by a remix and the addition of a rap. Elsewhere, the consistency is kept up by a small but beautifully formed family of writers and producers, most notably Angela Dust and Mark Drydon, who are responsible' for the Eve Gallagher tracks, among others. The whole lot comes ready-mixed as an uninterrupted dancefloor set and you could do far worse than slipping this CD on the next time you get too pissed - to work the turntables properly at a 4 party. Largely wonderful. RUSSELL BROWN

VARIOUS ARTISTS Until The End of the World (Warner Bros) In the liner notes Wim Wenders • thanks the various musicians for responding "to our proposition of projecting themselves into the year 1 999". The assembled cast with this brief and Wonder's languid directorial pace as visual stimuli have provided a soundtrack that is unified in its leisurely and slightly ambient cool and remote facade. A true soundtrack in that the songs were written for the film rather than the usual plundering of past ; catalogues for cineamatic .', I. < atmospherics, the album consequently succeeds well as an entity. In fact most of the artists here distinguish themselves even in the light of recent high standards. On 'Sax and Violins' Talking Heads are smooth, menacing funk reminiscent of Speaking In Tongues, Julee Cruise extends her camp, sleepy decadence on 'Summer Kisses, Winter Tears' while Crime and The City Solution's The Adversary should win this year's- - Cohen award and that's praise! Lou Reed's What's Good 7 is urbane, vintage Reed — the man on form, a condition that could be used to describe REM's 'Fretless', a song that would have positively shone on Out of Time. Costello's version of the Kink's 'Days' shifts the focus of the song from one of lilting appreciation to one of sombre remembrances — probably appropriate in the context of this film, but hardly an improvement on the original. Welcome kitsch melodrama arrives with Nick Cave's 'l'll Have You Till The End of the W>rld', but the second half of this sound track should be remembered for Depech Mode's funeral waltz 'Death's Door* and U2's cataclysmic 'Until The End of the World', the fitting conclusion to a body of music that's portentious, introspective and very effective at evoking the end of the world as we . know it. GEORGEKAY LUNG Cacti (Yellow Bike) . The bad news is that Aucklanders have stopped pretending their wretched 70s parties are "ironic": pre-punk values are totally dominant. More disturbing even than übiquitous muso-dom and the definition of rock 'n' r**l by 12-bar blues conventions rather than force and energy is the fact that suddenly everybody gives a shit about popularity again. Just because the Headless Chickens seduced the pre-teen market and Nirvana conned a few million Americans with their bland folk-metal compromise, it's become unacceptable not io want to "cross over", to have yourself ; i de-toothed and de-clawed and beg . for corporate patronage. . The good news is that somewhere in Palmerston North Dave White of Lung t is singing "She says fuck you and turns the gun on herself". Apart from being an electrifying moment in a damn fine hate song that line could be a A metaphor for the way Lung work: they court popular oblivion by taking their pugilistic anti-pop as far as it can go and, if ever it can be said of anyone, THEY DON'T CARE! Most of the songs here are fast and aggressive, built around ferocious geometric riffs, playing on the eternal tension between sparsness and noise overload, no-wave guitar expansion and skeletal post-punk structures. White's voice is more of a flat, disgusted sneer than a Gow Campbell breakdown howl, its violence all implied and thus potentially limitless. Departures from this forumula are 'Hardwired', a six-minute sprawl which fills its space rather too thinly, and 'Sleep', an industrial nightmare with a perversely addictive two note percussive tune. So don't despair, Aucklanders, just spit at the guy doing the drum solo, close your eyes and wait for the Manawatu invasion.

MATTHEW HYLAND