New From NZ: Coolies, Beach Pigs, Daif, Ha the Unclear

Our semi-regular NZ roundup returns with some eccentric delights.

– It’s taken four years to get some new songs out of Coolies, but the 100-run 7” Punk is Bread proves well worth the wait. The shouty and ultra-distorted noise-punk of 2010’s Master is continued to blistering effect on the opening ‘God Take Me’ and the instrumental ‘Punks Not Bread’ [sic], but the Auckland band change gears a fair bit over the six songs, most of which average around a minute each. ‘The City’ sounds like a kinder music jam gone feral, ‘Mothers in Mantis’ is sweetly melodic beneath its no-fi shell, ‘Ashes in the Sea’ manages to be at once sparse and abrasive and ‘Sucking’ is a charred, wandering instrumental. In other words, Coolies definitely haven’t lost their hunger for dismantling the idea of a punk song. If at first those tracks can seem like unfinished afterthoughts trailing behind the more substantial anthem ‘God Take Me’, they get a lot of appealing friction purely from how distinct they are from one another. It’s channel surfing driven right into the red. The EP is out now on vinyl through Epic Sweep and as a $5 download.

– Quite a bit more melodic, despite a vaguely menacing name, are Beach Pigs. The Auckland quartet pursue a sunny, harmony-prone strain of indie rock that’s nonetheless serrated with garage-y roughness. Their debut LP Grom Warfare showcases power-pop that’s as in love with fuzzy distortion as it is with shimmering jangle. You can hear a little Flying Nun in there, and maybe some Teenage Fanclub, plus a lot of the breathy guitar-pop that came in the wake of The Shins’ popularity. File it next to Popstrangers’ Antipodes, maybe. There’s a video for ‘Night Surfing’, a ’90s-ish album track that’s up for free download. The album itself is up for sale for $13 digitally.

– Crystal Magic can just do no wrong when it comes to wonky, self-aware releases that take sonic unreliability and faux nostalgia to plasticine extremes. We’ve gushed about their releases by Eyeliner, Perfect Hair Forever and Power Nap in this column previously, and Daif is the latest addition to the love-in. It’s the solo outlet of Wellington’s Daif King, who’s half of Golden Axe, and it basically sounds like mall muzak reclaimed as outsider art. The synth-steeped new album 2017 has been on rotation around these parts for weeks now. It’s available as a CD with what is surely a bizarre multimedia component for your computer, or as a name-your-price download. For more revelations about Crystal Magic, which was based in Sydney before returning to NZ, check out a recent segment on Radio New Zealand National.

– Ha the Unclear is a fairly oblique name, but it’s certainly an improvement on Brown, the former moniker of this Dunedin/Auckland band. Whatever way, they caught our attention with May’s single ‘Secret Lives of Furniture’, a quirky tune that’s “an anthropomorphic account of a coffee table’s infatuation for its owner.” (Sample lyric: “Then that bitch moved in/She said I was unstable.”) Produced by Oli Wilson (Males, The Chills), it’s unexpected in all the right ways – both lyrically and musically. It thus promises good things from the upcoming album Bacterium, Look at Your Motor Go, due out sometime next month. Investigate their back catalogue via Bandcamp.

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To nominate new music for this column, email us at news@messandnoise.com.