Archive for November 2015

Review- Picking favourites from the award winners of 2015

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Given that it's almost the end of the year, it seems like a good time to have a quick scan over the various award winners of the year and pick out some of the best.

Front of mind is the New Zealand Music Awards which took place recently. The Stuff website has a full list of winners, but rather than give more breath to the big winners (e.g., Broods), let's dig a bit further down the list.

First up, the Critic's Award winners, Bespin. The band are named after the cloud city on 'The Empire Strikes Back' and the group's dreamlike, psychedelic sound fits the name perfectly...




Marlon Williams was the winner of Best Male Solo Artist and Breakthrough Artist of the Year, as well as being in the shortlist for the Silver Scroll Awards (as well as being a nominee for "Best Blues and Roots Album" at the ARIA awards in Australia). His self-titled debut album is firmly based in the folk music, but the songwriting is strong enough to breath some new life into this tradition and the album was recorded by Lyttelton music scene stalwart, Ben Edwards.

Here's a creepy little tune he wrote about a man living in a house that seems to be filled with ghosts ever since his wife died. The video also features Williams's girlfriend, Aldous Harding, and they seem to just be a pair of hobos fooling around until the final twist...





The act that beat Williams at the Silver Scroll Awards was Unknown Mortal Orchestra, who recently released their third album. The outfit is led by Reuben Neilson from the Mint Chicks, though the recording also features his brother (Kody, who now plays as Silicon). The awards was given to UMO's tune, "Multi-Love", but I have to admit a preference for their tune "Keep Checking My Phone" and this live version (on Conan O'Brien) sounds great and shows Reuben dropping a nice dance move at the end...





Casting an eye across the Tasman, also shows a few worthy winners emerging from the Australia's ARIA awards. The psychedelic music revival is just as strong over there and Tame Impala has showed he is still ahead of the pack on his second album, Currents, which saw him win "Best Rock Album" and "Album of the Year." Equally deserving was Courtney Barnett who won "Best Breakthrough Artist" for her critically adored album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit. This tune about the unaffordability of local real estate should strike a chord with a lot of Aucklanders!




And last but not least, let's look even further northward and check out the winner of the UK's prestigious Mercury Prize, which has the occasional ability to shine a light on a upcoming talent that most of the country hasn't heard of. This year's winner was Benjamin Clementine, who grew up in London but was discovered by a French music label while busking on the streets of Paris. This led to his debut album, At Least For Now, being released back in the UK, though his real breakthrough wasn't until he scored a surprise slot on Later ... with Jools Holland.







Read: NZ Music Awards - 1995: A nod to the way we listened back in the day.

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Emerging from the shaggy sixties Kiwi music scene, the Loxene Gold Disc Awards were the groovy great grandparent of today’s New Zealand Music Awards.

To give a shout out to these often contentious awards, celebrated at Vector Arena in Auckland next week, I delve back in time, rewinding to the local tunes of 1995.

Twenty years ago, Grandmaster Jim Bolger turned up the national sound system, whilst the country swaggered and saluted a tangy tub of local treats. Running up the charts with her headless chooks, Fiona MacDonald tapped the bottle of pop recognition, severing the ties to their alternative cohorts with the ultra-digestible ‘Body Blow’. Also set for cruise control, brat-brass funky fellows Supergroove spun some major “Traction’ with their debut album sounding like a greatest hits of our summer antics.

South Auckland street-sounds blasted the skateboard ramps from Ranui to Raglan, with 3 the Hard Way’s heaving Holden anthem, “Hip Hop Holiday”, sparking many a tinny road trip over the summer months. Rollin ‘In the neighbourhood’, took the Sisters Underground from the Otara markets to the café stretches of Ponsonby proudness, crossing over our separated soundtracks.

Be it rhythm and booze or patriotic Dobbyn loyalty, we Kiwis punch way above our beat belts. We love our music, both local and otherwise. To stand beside our mates, on a girl’s night out or cruising down Dominion Road, we have and have always had a lot to celebrate. Not a lot has changed in that regard, even now, twenty years since 1995.


Listen - 'Carrie & Lowell' by Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty 2015)

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The latest Sufjan Stevens album Carrie & Lowell is named after his parents. Well, sort of. To be specific, it’s named after his mother, who left the family when Stevens was 1 year old, and the man she ended up with. Stevens wrote the album after her death, as he struggled to process both her passing, and the internal contradiction of feeling such immense grief at losing someone with whom he’d created so few memories, shared so little time. As he sings on the song All of Me and All of You: “Should we beat this or celebrate it?”

It’s my favourite Sufjan album. Those same delicate, cyclical guitar arpeggios which have been the foundation for so many of his songs are intact, but they’re both darker and, for me at least, more beautiful. Where previous records adorned this foundation with cheerful orchestral arrangements or abrasive electronica, Carrie & Lowell fills out the stereo spectrum with little more than a second acoustic guitar matching the first, as if to keep it company, and obsessively double tracked lead vocals. One feels that Stevens is singing and strumming along with himself because everything would just be too sad, too raw, without the extra ambience of a companion, even if the companion must be his own ghost vocal. The lyrics blend wisps of happy memory with jarring references to emotional dysfunction, self-destruction, and a deep sadness, all rendered beautiful by yearning melodies that never stoop to maudlin.

The first single No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross exemplifies the emotional complexity that can result from relatively unsubtle constituent parts. The singer castigates himself with sarcasm, (“Like a champion, get drunk to get laid,”) implores fate to connect him with his mother in any way possible, (“Drag me to hell in the valley of the damned, like my mother. . .”), imagines some invisible presence conspiring against him (“my assassin like Casper the ghost”), before concluding in the songs title that there is no grace to be found in the struggle to bare life’s burden. 
Yet as he passes through these lyrical stations of pain Stevens sings along with himself as sweetly, as angelically, as he ever has, leaving us with the impression that maybe it’s okay to celebrate what you can’t beat. It’s a nice feeling to get from a record. 

Simon C.

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