Together, Emily Fairlight and The Shifting Sands’ Mike McLeod have created a special new album capturing a special moment, sounding like they’re “playing in your lounge.” Sun Casts a Shadow by Emily Fairlight / The Shifting Sands Fairlight has been composing and performing for over a decade, playing throughout New Zealand and Australia
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Negative Nancies exist in their own universe. The songs evolve organically through rehearsal room experimentation. Amid the No Wave art-punk chaos an irrepressible undercurrent of pop melodicism and moments of eerie psychedelic calm shine through the noise. Negative Nancies don’t play by anyone’s rules. Songs unfold in unusual ways through an organic wild-yeast
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Pōneke/ Wellington jangle / surf / fuzz-pop sextet Tidal Rave return with an eight song album. “Albumette” was primarily written during the seemingly never-ending 2020 lockdown era, and explores such pertinent topics as “police incompetence, problematic capitalism, disconnection and in-between spaces.” The recording sounds darker and heavier on “Albumette”, and the bands song-writing
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Wellington based six-piece band Tidal Rave continues a New Zealand (and Australasian) tradition of dark, compelling guitar and keyboard lead garage rock. There’s something slightly claustrophobic and unsettling at times about the churning dense weave of the three guitars and bass backed by ghostly organ and insistent drum pulse. Add the character provided by the
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Emily Fairlight has a proper folk singer’s background having been, among other things, a teenage runaway adventurer in Australia and India, a circus school student, a barista and a runner turned jack-of-all-trades at a digital visual effects company. “Mother of Gloom” an elusive creature, but the prevalence of acoustic guitar and intimate sharing of lived experience point
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If guitar rock is dead, no-one told Bad Sav. The latest blast of Analogue Dunedin comes from the band that refused to be left behind. Although featuring Death And The Maiden guitarist/vocalist Hope Robertson and bassist/vocalist Lucinda King, plus Shifting Sands guitarist Mike McLeod (on drums here), Bad Sav are the primary strain
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The second album from Port Chalmers, Dunedin band Death and the Maiden creates a shadowy world within a world; populated by melancholy melodic synth waves, dreamy reverb washed guitars and vocals that celebrate the excruciating beauty and crushing weight of everyday life. The band – Lucinda King (vocals, Bass), Hope Robertson (guitar, drums,
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The expression Élan Vital describes the impulse of life. The music on the debut album “Shadow Self” by Dunedin cold-wave trio Élan Vital represents that life impulse in an ambiguous zone between machine and human worlds. A dense claustrophobic swirl of dark dance-tempo synth-pop blooms from gloomy cold industrial dance music with vocoder
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The Prophet Hens return for a 2nd album. “The Wonderful Shapes of Back Door Keys”, delivers on the tuneful jangly promise of their debut album “Popular People Do Popular People”. US music blog The Finest Kiss described their popular debut as “Chills meets Belle And Sebastian pop alchemy” before saying “The Prophet Hens
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The music on Cosmic Radio Station was first beamed into the Pacific ether from a woolshed and a tumbledown house perched on the hills above Port Chalmers near Dunedin during a period of heightened aurora activity in the deep south caused by cosmic rays from solar flares. Head back to Port Chalmers itself
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