Features
New From NZ: Perfect Hair Forever, Grayson Gilmour, Lightning Tape Wolf
By Doug Wallen
Welcome to our new semi-regular column on current New Zealand music, roughly in the manner of New Noise.
– Like some one-man cottage industry of snotty, scorched-earth malevolence, Auckland’s Perfect Hair Forever pumps out one- and two-minute blasts of noise-punk and pixelated experimentation without ever revealing his actual name. He’s prolific too: his new album PUKER comes close on the tail of last year’s OK COOL and MALL-O-CAUST, all released through Sydney label Crystal Magic. PUKER starts with the truly batshit nightmare-teen rant ‘I Hate the Mall, I Hate Them All’, but from there the record is a slightly more conventional assault of “brat-pop” chaos and choruses. (Think Jay Reatard, Mint Chicks or early Wavves.) These are ridiculous yet entrancing anthems overloaded with both adrenaline and the exaggerated comic turmoil of adolescence’s vast minefield. Oh, and Perfect Hair Forever plays live too: cross your fingers for an Australian tour.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Perfect Hair Forever - O.K. It's Gone by CRYSTALMAGIC
– Also fairly prodigious in his output is Wellington’s Grayson Gilmour, who by now has a nice little stack of releases spanning the past decade. His lushly creative 2010 album No Constellation was the first release from Flying Nun after the label was reclaimed by founder Roger Shepherd, and last year FN put out Gilmour’s adventurous soundtrack to the NZ indie film The Most Fun You Can Have Dying. His latest release is a limited split 7” with Boycrush, the collaboration between Alistair Deverick and The Ruby Suns. Gilmour’s contribution is ‘In a Former Life I Worshipped the Sun’, which comes with a drastic remix by Paperghost as part of the name-your-price digital purchase. The ambient-minded, wide-horizon song was started in Madrid with Jivraj Singh on drums and finished at home in NZ.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]In A Former Life I Worshipped The Sun by Mess+Noise
– This might be bending the rules a bit, as there’s no new song to share, but Christchurch’s Lightning Tape Wolf is making two live appearances in Victoria this month. Besides, you can get quite a telling glimpse of the newly rechristened project from the below short film – presented as a trailer – I Kill, which revives all the best qualities of classic black-and-white Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder. The film and the band are the work of Dylan Herkes, who founded the small label Stink Magnetic Record Co. and has followed his cryptic muse through bands like Planet of the Tapes and, well, many others with “Tape” in the name. Herkes’ “150% haunted surf trash” consists of “instrumental fuzzed-up guitar over home-recorded voodoo drums and fuzz bass tracks,” with his newest incarnation “born of the same black abyss” as former alter ego The Mysterious Tape Man. Confused? That’s swell.
Thurs, May 16 – Barwon Club, Geelong, VIC [The Bonniwells + Towelheads]
Fri, May 17 – Grace Darling, Melbourne, VIC [The Bonniwells, Towelheads + Ausmuteants]
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