Gate- Sunshine/Ives

Twisted Village

1992

Long running solo/side project of Dead C guitarist Michael Morely.  The A side is Gate at its most Dead C-ish.  With an actual guitar riff, drums, and vocals, this one comes off as very similar to what remained of recognizable song structure c. harsh 70's reality.  B side is one of Morley's guitar improv & record loops pieces.

Sunshine/Ives

Various- I Hear The Devil Calling Me

Drag City

1991

This excellent early Drag City release is among the best of a handful of great Xpressway Records comps that popped up in the early/mid 90's.  Despite the limitations of format, this release manages to squeeze in 12 bands in roughly as many minutes.  A concise, but surprisingly accurate overview of the label.  Featuring:

 1. Alastair Galbraith

 2. A Handful of Dust

 3. Peter Jefferies

 4. OLLA

 5. The Renderers

 6. The Dead C

 7. Gate

 8. Cyclops

 9. Dadamah

10. David Mitchell

11. Queen Meanie Puss

12. Stephen Kilroy

I Hear The Devil Calling Me

Terminals- Medusa/Scarecrow

Roof Bolt Recordings

1996

This blog has been sorely neglected as of late, I know.  In an attempt to rectify that, I'm declaring April to be NEW ZEALAND MONTH.  Gimmicky, I know, but hopefully it'll be enough to motivate me to make time to post as many records as possible over the next few weeks.  Some choice cuts coming, so, you know, be sure to check back and all that.

First up, a real burner from the Terminals.  Though not too well known stateside, they're pretty much revered at home.  Formed in the mid 80's, they're still (somewhat) active, having released an album as recently as last year or so.  Their earliest material displayed elements of early 80's Flying Nun jangle but eventually began to morph into the much darker sort of organ driven menace that appears on this record.  This being New Zealand, of course everyone in the group was in a handful of other, equally amazing bands such as Victor Dimisch Band, Renderers, Dadamah, Flies Inside the Sun, etc. 

Medusa/Scarecrow

Dadamah- Scratch Sun

Majora

1991

Music scenes are by nature incestuous.  But the word still seems wholly inadequate when applied to the heyday of the New Zealand post-punk underground (c. late 70's- mid 90's).  There is an amazing body of work from that corner of the world at that time spread over a myriad of cassette, 7", hyper-limited lathe cut, compilation, and LP/CD releases.  Delve in and you'll immediately start to notice a handful or so names that seem to pop up everywhere.  everywhere.  With Dadamah we have Roy Montgomery, Peter Stapleton, and Kim Pieters who had been in or would go on to a number of bands like (but certainly not limited to) The Pin Group, Terminals, Flies Inside the Sun, Victor Dimisich, band, Dissolve, Scorched Earth Policy, etc.  Montgomery also eventually went on to release a number of solo and collaborative records and garnered something of a cult following by the late 90's.  

As far as the pantheon of Kiwi Rock goes, Dadamah is a near perfect example of a particularly virulent strain of NZ noise weaned on equal parts White Light era Velvets, Kill Yr Idols era Sonic Youth and the darker corners of UK Post-Punk a la Joy Division, Wire, and the Fall.  They didn't last long, but what they left behind still resonates pretty strongly.  This record along with everything else they ever recorded (a scant 2 singles, an LP and a single comp track in all) were compiled on a CD collection by Kranky back in the mid-90's.  Amazing.

Scratch Sun

Table- Gag Box

Spangled Records

Edition of 1000

1992

Another of the first batch of records I bought after I got ahold of my first record player.  I'd have to say that this one is probably the pick of the litter.  I believe I picked this up on account of a staff description describing it as "slintish".  At this point I was still years away from fully recovering from my first exposure to Spiderland and was on a desperate, and ultimately futile, search for anything that might measure up.  By decades end the Slint tag got thrown around pretty easily, and usually meant basement bush leaguers doing soft/loud, talk/yell in 5/4 that at its best was going to play out like Mogwai-lite.  But when I picked this up in '93, there was still a chance you might find something that was at least cut from a similar cloth.  The Slint comparison is fair enough, but this stuff really probably falls a bit closer to the Rapeman or Bastro end of things.  The hallmarks of the genre are all here- odd-metered, bass heavy riffs, angular guitar noise, precision drumming, and obtuse lyrics in that half spoken delivery that are all but buried in the mix.   At the time, every third band in the world was trying to pull this sort of thing off, but still nothing quite sounds like those Table records.  Despite making truly unique records these guys were fairly unknown. Some of Table's obscurity no doubt though lies in the fact that, well, they never really did much. They apparently existed for around a year, played, maybe,  a dozen shows around Chicago, and did two recording sessions before the bassist split town (apparently under shifty circumstances) and the band fell apart.  This record comes from the first sessions done with Albini in January of '92.  A second 7" appeared in '93 on Homestead by which point I think they might have already been kaput.  After that, these guys pretty much disappeared and that was that.  Though I recently found out that the bassist, Warren Fischer, popped up a few years back as one half of the electro-pop duo Fischerspooner.  hmmm...  At some point in the mid-90's, there was a posthumously released CD collection released on Humble that contained both records as well the remaining tracks from the two sessions done with Steve Albini and Brad Wood.  If you can find a copy, the CD is amazing and well worth taking the effort to track down.  I haven't seen it in years, but i still come across the records from time to time.  Cheap usually too.  In the meantime, dig on this gem here:

Gag Box/Unwind