Listen: David Dallas - Falling Into Place

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With his song Runnin featuring on ESPN Monday Night Football, the Madden 25 trailer, the FIFA 14 soundtrack and Major League Baseball and the NFL, David Dallas is making waves stateside. What's more, the American music chart and industry magazine Billboard has picked up on his momentum and is featuring an exclusive album premiere of Falling Into Place on its site. Billboard adds:

 "Lorde is proof that New Zealand's music scene can cross borders in a big way. But is the world ready for a Kiwi hip-hop star? David Dallas is keen to find out. The rapper is already a rising star in his homeland. With his third album dropping in the U.S. on Tuesday, Dallas will test just how far his talents – and the New Zealand hip hop community – can stride."

 Check out the full story and the album stream here thanks to Billboard. 


Various Artists: Pressure To Be - 18 and under New Zealand

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It can't be easy being an under-aged band. You can't play at bars (mostly), and if you play in a non-conventional venue it's really easy for someone to call noise control and have you shut down. Where do you play? How do you keep momentum after that riotous Rockquest performance that changed some of your schoolmates lives but didn't tick the boxes on the judges checksheet? And then with all that there's often a lack of financial means for instruments etc, curfews, lack of transport, still developing musical skills...

Hamilton used to have a thriving music scene in the mid 2000s. They might still do (do they?), but you wouldn't really know it because there's a dearth of places to play. I'm no authority, but from the outside it looked like one of the reasons why Hamilton had so many good bands midway through the last decade is there was a place for their youngest incarnations to play. Youth Zone was a venue in the city centre which was relatively affordable and accessible to young bands. From what I remember it was council run or subsidised. Bands young and old could play there and it was a skip and a jump, literally and figuratively, away from R18 venues like Ward Lane. It gave kids somewhere they could safely listen to or play music on Friday and Saturday nights. Youth Zone is gone now and it seems like it took Hamilton's thriving music scene with it. Our other main centres have had similar problems, when there's a viable all ages venue it's surprising how many incredible bands come out of the woodwork, but the venues come and go, and so do a lot of the bands. As an aside, you can see why Parachute became such a popular destination for underage punk/hardcore bands and fans (Christian and otherwise). If there's no venues in your town and your drummer went to church, you could play for kids from up and down the country  Parachute still seems to hold a place like that for punk and hardcore bands, but now with things like Camp A Low Hum and Chronophonium that kind of festival opportunity is becoming more available for good young bands.

 Pressure To Be - 18 and Under New Zealand is a compilation of bands where the members were all 18 or under at the time. While playing live is filled with obstacles for young bands, these guys managed to find places to do it. Not to say that this is the only document of an all ages scene in New Zealand, but with all the barriers stopping young bands from being able to play and release music, a document of posterity like this feels really valuable. Even if our cities remain unhelpful towards underage bands being able to play live, at least the home recording revolution means that we'll increasingly have documentation of their music.

Something I really enjoy in these kinds of documents is that there's often some sort of statement in the liner notes. The compiler inevitably cringes at them, but they're pretty great in their context. I wish I'd been including these from the start. Here's a snippet from Pressure To Be's liner notes.

 "We feel that there are too many good young New Zealand bands around for this [compilation] not to happen; there are many more exceptional young bands around, but these are our favourites. Even if some of these bands disintegrate over the next years, this won't be the last you see of these individuals."

I haven't seen too many of these bands, even though Pressure To Be isn't far removed from the time of Awesome Feeling and the heyday of A Low Hum. It's interesting to hear the compilers talk about the influence of Awesome Feeling on their compilation (it's worth noting one of the compilers of Pressure To Be was Nicole Gaffney, a member of Auckland act Moron Says What?! - a teenaged band of wunderkinds that  first came to many people's attention on Awesome Feeling II). And with Pressure To Be's proximity to that time, they feel like the second shockwave after that earlier boom of bands and their recordings.

It's not just age that ties the compilation together. With the cyclic nature of musical movements, there's a definite 1990s flavour that runs through the songs, a tendency towards distortion, with vocals low in the mix, a youthful disinterest in making anything with overt commercial ambition, but a lot of great songs. There's These Dancing Wolves recalling Dischord Records, the slacker vibes of Nevernudes on White Teethed Teens (cease and desist Lorde), wunderkind Shipwreck's (now renamed Lontalius) bedroom pop and the almighty racket of TFF.

 These Dancing Wolves with album opener Chief, King Sir

While there might not be any huge names on the compilation (at least looking at it now...) it seems like a pretty worthy moment, and a lot of them are probably doing/going to do amazing stuff down the track and we'll look back on their stuff on this compilation as this thing of precocious beauty. Let's hear from Pressure to Be compilers Nicole Gaffney and James Stuteley after the jump. 

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Simon Grigg and Audio Culture (the noisy library of New Zealand music)

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Audio Culture: The Noisy Library of New Zealand Music has recently been added to the music resources in Auckland Libraries Digital Library. It is not only an excellent resource for the study and appreciation of New Zealand’s popular music history but also a fine way to lose hours of your life.

The sites original architect, Simon Grigg, and his co-conspirator, Murray Cammick, will be speaking at the Auckland Central City Library on Thursday Oct 3rd. A Facebook event page has been set up for the event. By way of introduction to the event Simon was good enough to answer a few questions for us.

Did your experince with your own blogs kickstart this project?

 Yes it did. I've been slowly trying to archive the music and times I've been involved in
over the years as we have such huge gaps in our popular music documentation and the public availability of it. There are several amazing blogs and sites but no one place where we could look at all of it and see how it all fits together. The concept came together in mid-2010 and it developed from there. I had early talks with several people, notably journalist Gary Steel, RIANZ's Chris Caddick, NZMC's Simon Woods, Universal's Adam Holt and Gemma Gracewood and the site grew from there.

The site seems to be all encompassing, embracing many, many different facets of NZ music, was that the plan from the start or did it develop over time?

If you look at my history it embraces punk, indie rock, hip-hop, dance music, jazz and pop so there was never any chance that AudioCulture was going be one-dimensional genre wise. We are a small country and so many things and people stride over multiple genres – it's our strength. AudioCulture hopefully gives some context to that. So, in answer to your question, it was always the plan.


Why do you think this is important?

Music is a part of our national lifeblood. We are one of the heaviest per-head music buying nations in the world and we buy and listen to vast amounts of our own music. And more than that, our music has a wonderfully unique flavour melded by our physical place in the world (and our isolation), our joining of cultures, our climate and the changing cultural mix of the nation. We grow up, meet our partners, go out to and are quite obsessive about the music we make, perhaps only secondary to sports. Music is us.

Do you think there is a danger we are losing our pop culture history? (I have often been surprised by how much the library does NOT have in its collection)

We have been in grave danger for a long time. Not of losing our pop culture history, but of losing big parts of it. Whilst there has been increasing amounts of ours musical past gathered and collected we also missed large parts of the story and it simply goes if we don't grab it. The work of various amateur bloggers and historians, libraries both regional and central, Radio New Zealand, and writers such as Chris Bourke, Gareth Shute and John Dix have gathered together large parts of the musical legacy of New Zealand. Our job is not to replace these people and organisations but to to add to the amazing body of work that exists. I think it's also important that our musical past and its related cultures are visible and accessible. That is a big part of our brief. It's an exciting story and we want people to know as much about extraordinary musicians like The La De Da's as they do about The Rolling Stones.



I also think we need to understand the scenes and communities that grew up around our music. It's fine to write about a band or singer, but what of the culture and world they came from? That melded them and they melded it.

As part of doing this have you discovered stories or music that you were previously unaware of? if so, what were some of those surprises?

Countless stories. Rarely a day passes when I'm not given writing or an image that just astounds me. Some of our writers have vast archives and an encyclopedic understanding of New Zealand's music and its music makers. We also have musicians coming to us daily offering unpublished images. I love this story of Chris Malcolm – born in NZ, brought up in the US. He came to to NZ in the 1960s and wrote one of the great psychedelic pop tunes of the era. Before Grant Gillanders submitted this story I had no idea. The same writer has submitted an extraordinary piece on the 60s group The Pleazers which explores the relationship between a band and their label in the 1960s in a way I've never read before. It will go up shortly.

Another of the goldmines is the Phil Warren archive at Auckland Library. There is so much in there we want to explore – so many stories that we've not even touched on yet. 

Simon and Murray's talk will take place on Thursday 3rd Oct on the second floor of Auckland Central City Library in the Whare Wananga from 6pm.

-Kelly



Q&A: Arthur Ahbez

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Arthur Ahbez has just released his first album Gold. In his own words, he’s been “lost in the 1960s for nearly 10 years” and it shows on a record that shows a deep love for Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Dylan and the Velvet Underground. All Things Musical sat down one Wednesday lunchtime to do a gmail chat with him about recording Gold, his creative journey over the past couple of years and finding an eight track tape machine in an opshop.
Tell me about recording Gold and the how/what/why/when of it…
The best way to describe it is a window into the way I hear music and relate to it. And "see" it. I worked on the record for about 2 and a 1/2 years, piecing it together in my room on a 8 track tape deck I found out hunting for vintage garments… It was an amazing find, hidden under a pile of old flannel shirts. As soon as I saw it I knew it was what I needed and thus began the start of my record. The songs I decided to put on the record mean a lot to me. I've called the record Gold because that's in part what I feel subjectively it is. I'd play the songs over and over again on my guitar and on the recording as I wanted to be sure they weren't something temporal. I wanted to be sure they really meant something to me. Plus like any artist I’m extremely self-critical of my work - although I've loosed up a bit now. But being the first recorded output I've done publicly I wanted to make sure I could still enjoy it 10 years from now and have the record age into a timelessness. I'd have a lot of fun recording it, but at times it was a nightmare as I had no one to really feed back off and I had to learn as I went… how to record, how to mix, layer etc. Anyway - now that I've finished I want to keep going. I can't wait to do another record as I have all this material that I couldn't get right on the first record due to inexperience. This album was kind of the first step/leap of faith etc into becoming an artist even though I've played live music for years… I wasn't sure how people would react to my songwriting and ideas as I've been lost in the 1960s for nearly 10 years. But I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and most importantly I can hear all my influences in the songs. And hopefully other people will too. One thing to note, I'm really obsessed with folk songwriting. Not as traditional as Woody Guthrie, more like his contemporaries (though I dig Guthrie)… so with my first (and hopefully not last) record I always wanted to make it folk in heart and nature, and most of the songs bear that stamp.



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Listen: Hula Hope - Lamp

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The appropriate response to Hula Hope's charming debut album is this.



Formerly of the excellent, maximalist Wellington all-girl troupe St Rupertsberg and long-serving folksters UrbanTramper, Hula Hope has been playing solo for a few years alongside those projects and has finally released the above solo record all of her own.

Enlisting the help of two different young producers - Lehmann B. Smith (listen to his 40-deep record of his extremely short, extremely good indie pop songs on his bandcamp) of Melbourne and Dave Parker of West Auckland (download his lushly produced, all New Zealand collection of original Christmas songs here), Lamp is blessed with a cohesive amalgamation of 60s girl pop, modern indie pop and alt country. She sings with an unashamed local accent, trades quips with Steve Abel's powerful baritone pipes, and has epiphanies that a boy's refusal to wait for the bus with her is one of those minor details that sounds innocuous but should maybe be a dealbreaker. It's well worth a listen and if she charms you like she did me, you can buy it straight from her bandcamp site (or straight from the bandcamp streaming widget above).




Blog Wars

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All Things Musical isn't exactly a hard-hitting journalistic institution, more of a little side project in between shelving music scores, withdrawing Nickelback CDs and explaining to the odd patron the difference between "the internet" and "Google" (bless).

Fortunately there's much better music blogs out there fighting the good fight ever after the latest nail in the coffin of quality music journalism in New Zealand. One of the best is Russell Brown's Friday Music, which comes out weekly on Russell Brown's Hard News blog on Public Address. He's passionate and thoughtful and has an enviable awareness of a variety of music. I wouldn't say the same about Simon Sweetman's Off The Tracks, a spin-off of his Stuff.co.nz musings at Blog On The Tracks, but his writing does seem to attract a lot of readers. Those worlds collided this past Friday's post when Brown outlined his objections to a flimsy Sweetman attempted takedown of Lorde's The Love Club EP. Here's a taster.
"Sweetman thinks of himself as an iconoclast, and, yeah, it takes some nerve to denounce barbecue reggae in a Wellington paper. Someone had to. He can write well about the range of music he likes, and completely miss the point of anything outside that range. Too often, he seems to be merely seeking attention. But in this review, he writes like the troubled child he believes Ella Yelich-O'Connor to be. The one who needs to grow up isn't Lorde. I think it would be decent of him to apologise for parts of what he wrote."
Read the full post on Hard News for an excellently thought out rebuke to a rather thoughtless and insulting dismissal.

And while Lorde smartly ignores bad reviews (and finds others going in to bat for her...), elsewhere on the internet a local band is taking matters into their own hands. The Neo-Kalashnikovs took issue with reviews of their single Gorgeous Baby over at The Corner and took to the comments section to defend their honour. Context: the website has a panel of writers who offer their thoughts on local singles. While I can't say I always agree with them, more content focusing on local bands is a positive. And even if the reviews aren't always so, it opens up a dialogue. Anyway, check out the post and the comments here, and take a look at the video if you feel like making up your own mind or happen to be a really big Coronation Street fan.








Watch: Arcade Fire - Reflektor

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Canadian indie rockers Arcade Fire have released the first single from their forthcoming album, which is also titled Reflektor. Produced by James Murphy, he of LCD Soundsystem/DFA Records, it subverts a disco beat into something that's quite low key, while remaining very anthemic. It's great stuff and bodes well for the material we'll be hearing when they grace Western Springs Stadium for the Big Day Out in New Zealand this summer.

Like a boss

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Auckland band Great North (or more specifically - their singer Hayden Donnell) are massive Bruce Springsteen fans. Having yet to be shoulder tapped by The Boss himself, they've taken it upon themselves to get the attention of him/his management or the tour promoter in another way. They're collecting signatures for a petition. Here's the lowdown via their petition site..

Great North frontman Hayden Donnell is a Springsteen fan. He yells the words to Thunder Road at traffic lights as fellow commuters stare, weeps on the couch to The Rising, feels unironic joy at the sound of a sax solo. Once, in a fit of madness, he bought plane tickets to see a Springsteen show in Hamilton, Canada. Please get behind Great North's bid for the second support slot for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at their Auckland show on March 1, 2014. Note: We don't want to replace Jimmy Barnes, just play before him. Or work out some harmonies to Working Class Man and play with him. Anything.

If that doesn't convince you, they include an array of charming testimonies. Here's a couple of favourites. 
David Parker, Great North producer at Little Monster Studio, enemy: 7:17pm:
"One time I told Hayden I didn't really like Bruce Springsteen's music that much and so he put on a Springsteen album at full volume while trapping me in a corner and dancing up against me while I cowered on the floor. I am still traumatised by this event." 9:45pm: "I do not support this campaign, Hayden is a narcissist and you're all encouraging him."

Rachel, Great North band member, wife: Hayden has openly admitted that, while our relationship is fairly solid, he would likely leave me if Bruce Springsteen became available. I'm okay with this. Hayden deserves it.

Check out the petition right here and do consider signing it. They're a great band with a dream to open for their hero.

Listen: She's So Rad - Last Dance EP

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Auckland shoegazers She's So Rad are taking a different tack on a new EP for Japanese label Wonderful Noise. The Last Dance EP sees songwriter/producer Jeremy Toy (Sommerset, Open Souls) taking an analogue dominated walk down the path of disco and boogie, finding itself somewhere between ESG and Talking Heads' funkier productions. It was recorded in 24bit and at 88.2khz (for you non-sound nerds out there, they're measurements of sound resolution - similar to how a photo can be taken in a high resolution) to give it the highest fidelity possible, so that the vinyl pressing will be drawing its reproduction from the highest quality source material. 

 While the full EP isn't up online, here's a digest of it via Wonderful Noise's Soundcloud.






Listen: The Naked and Famous - Hearts Like Ours

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About to release a follow-up to their highly successful record Passive Me, Aggressive You, The Naked and Famous have released a single from the forthcoming In Rolling Ways. After releasing a series of EPs (and first appearing on Awesome Feeling - see our post on the 2007 compilation here), the band made it big in 2010, with their youth anthem Young Blood hitting #1 on the NZ singles chart and going on to chart in various places worldwide.

Hearts Like Ours isn't the immediate rush of Young Blood, but that would be asking a lot. It's still a dreamy, cinematic track that oozes youthful nostalgia. Pre-orders of the album are available on iTunes and the song was premiered by Zane Lowe at BBC Radio 1 in the UK last night. Check it out via the Soundcloud widget below.


Via Under The Radar

Listen: Unknown Mortal Orchestra cover Otis Redding's (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay

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Check out Unknown Mortal Orchestra's flawless cover of (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay. The band is on tour this month and the Auckland show is reportedly just a few tickets away from selling out, so get in quick and grab tickets at Under The Radar.

Thursday July 18 - ReFuel, Dunedin
Friday July 19 - Kings Arms, Auckland
Saturday July 20th – Bodega, Wellington

Various Artists #3: Awesome Feeling

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As we talked about in Various Artists #2 with Go With The Movers, the mid 00s was a boom time for local music. It felt like there was a new band popping up every week. The ground was fertile - there were places for them to play, sometimes quite a lot of people to come see them, Blink was hitting his straps with his A Low Hum tours (which probably served to unify bands and audiences from across the country with tours that might not have happened otherwise) and the popularity of MySpace and more widespread internet access meant that new bands from all points of the country could get heard sooner. Amongst all that, in 2007 Real Groove (RIP, and not to be confused with the zombified corpse of Groove Guide these days) had a bold editor - Duncan Greive - who'd give a fair shake to the new Paris Hilton album just as soon as a four track recording of something noisy and exciting from Christchurch. And I seem to remember Stevie Kaye foregoing sleep and food and oxygen in an effort to get tracks from unheard artists up and down the country and write about them.

I don't like NME - I think it overhypes a lot of terrible UK bands because they need a new flavour of the month. But at the same time, you have to admire their willingness to champion great local music (even if the greatness of the music sometimes feels self-generated by the magazine itself). If there's a band that's killing it and doing fresh new things, you'll hear about it - and the whole new genre said band is supposedly spearheading. Maybe things are changing here, or maybe it's a population thing, but it feels like we don't have that same confidence in our own culture until it's been validated by various outside sources.

So Awesome Feeling was really awesome. Months earlier it'd been Liam Finn on the cover, which wasn't so out of the blue given his pedigree, but still seemed kinda bold ahead of his album release and its singles. Then for the issue carrying the Awesome Feeling compilation it was So So Modern front and centre, which must have been a shock to large portions of the public, but was so warranted considering the live phenomenon they'd become. Though they pulled pretty great numbers for a local band, it wasn't about the numbers at the shows. In terms of transforming an audience and actually getting Aucklanders to dance, they seemed unstoppable. They weren't alone in starting to peak. Cut Off Your Hands and Collapsing Cities became NME darlings, Bachelorette signed to Drag City, Diasteradio would tour the world. On the second edition it was the same thing, Street Chant had a four track demo as Mean Street (shot to the compilers for hearing a great song under the tape hiss and thin sound), it featured Princess Chelsea before she became a YouTube sensation, there was High Stakes - who had a #1 dancehall single in Jamaca, and AFII was the first place a lot of people heard The Naked and Famous before they had a record breaking #1 NZ single and turned heads the world over. Here's former Real Groove editor Duncan Grieve talking about the comp after the jump.

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Yeezus

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If you're like us and can't wait for the very impending release of Kanye West's new album Yeezus, here's some tidbits to tide you over.

As one of our favourite blogs The Corner writes, some of his new material is being projected and played at locations all over the world. Here are the times and locations for the projections happening in Auckland tonight.

The New York Times did an interview with Yeezy for their blog. It's fascinating stuff. He's as confident as ever, comparing himself to Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan and gets into talking about the minimal construction of Yeezus. Check it out here. It's filled with other must read material like him regretting ever apologising to Taylor Swift with quotes like this:

But has that instinct led you astray? Like the Taylor Swift interruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, things like that. It’s only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.

And over at the Wall Street Journal, they've got an interview with Rick Rubin about the process and how Kanye promised to "score 40 points in the 4th quarter" to finish Yeezus in time for release.

And with the news that the album's leaked, there's also a number of reviews popping up online as various music reviewers try to figure out their feelings for an undoubtedly complex album while itching to yell "FIRST". Naturally most of this writing is terrible. Do the right thing - buy it in a few days and make up your own mind at the kind pace a good record deserves.

Listen: PNC/David Dallas - Kobe & LeBron

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Someone once compared basketball to jazz - looking to draw a parallel between the improvisations of each medium. But you'd have a hard job selling that to a lot of latter day fans. With LeBron James and the Miami Heat currently playing in their third straight NBA finals appearance, now is the perfect time to listen to the always excellent PNC and David Dallas on their collaboration Kobe & LeBron (hit play on the widget above courtesy of TheAudience.co.nz).


While we're on the topic, let's take a look at some of basketball's most memorable musical connections. Just as PNC and David Dallas are basketball fans, a lot of basketballers are rap fans, which has sometimes led to pretty amazing results. Check out some of our favourites after the jump.

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Guest post: favourite discoveries of NZ Music Month

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At the beginning of the month, I wrote about plans to raid our awesome music collection and listen to a New Zealand CD every day throughout Music Month. Much, much music later, here are four favourites from the month's exploration, and some clips to brighten the leaden-skied Queen's Birthday gloom out there. Check them out after the jump.

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