KEY POINTS:
Grand Prix play the Wine Cellar on Karangahape Rd tonight. It's an apt venue, even if frontman Andrew McKenzie admits he hasn't seen it. Like Grand Prix's music, the Cellar is a dark, dingy gem tucked away down a flight of stairs. From the road anyway, it's not
what it seems.
Grand Prix - an underrated New Zealand band who you wouldn't expect to come from Wellington - don't have much to be dark about these days. Their third album, Terraplane Twilight, is one of this year's best local releases, a moody trip anchored on their love of country music, with a few grand themes and beautiful production from Brett Stanton.
Although McKenzie wrote the band's first two albums while unemployed, these songs came from staying up late at night. Perhaps that explains why there's less of the mariachi, spaghetti western influence of their earlier work and a bit more of an atmospheric sound that makes this perfect material for a night drive down the Desert Road.
There's a chance their repertoire might cheer up should the album put them in the commercial stead they deserve; and who knows, they might end up playing a bigger venue next time they come to Auckland. But for now, they're right at home injecting songs like The Funeral - "The cross makes a shadow across your grave" - with a theatrical, vaguely funny sense of the morbid.
"I guess I feel pretty dark about stuff in general," says McKenzie, on the phone from Wellington. "It's pretty dark being a musician. I just paint houses during the day. Unless you're Neil Finn or someone like that, you have to do some kind of work or be on the dole. And I don't think being on the dole makes you very happy."
That's not to say the darkness is necessarily miserable - their songs tap into something menacing yet enticing, like a black cloud on a clear horizon.
"The devil thinks he is an angel," McKenzie sings over a shimmering sea of organ and autoharp on a song named after Beelzebub.
"One of the things I've always wanted from music was for it not to be more mellow but kind of dramatic and exciting, something that will grab you."
Whether it's drummer Davey Geard's "recorder of death" or the Grand Prix Boys Choir (Wellington singer-songwriters Luke Buda, Age Pryor and Craig Terris) joining in on the album's tribute to Roy Orbison, there's a lot to grab you. But perhaps the most intriguing addition is the fuzzy, religious chanting on opening track Always Beginning. Someone in the studio had a sampler that played Hindu chants and turned it on while they were working on the song. "It just happened to have the right rise and fall and it mirrored the song. Me and Bret liked it. The others said `Nah, that's crazy. What's that on there?' But we persevered."
Grand Prix began in 2001 as a three-piece country band with no drums or bass but three years later had expanded to include drummer and vocalist Geard (Letterbox Lambs and D-Super), Mike Banks on bass and Viv Treweek on trumpet. When Banks and Treweek left, Nato Hickey (Paselode, Fly My Pretties) stepped in; as did Bonnie Scarlet's frontman Adam Ladley on keys.
As for McKenzie's vocals, which have been described as a combination of Nick Cave and a grass-roots Kiwi country crooner, they've changed too. On their first album, Racing Lines, the band were esconced in a traditional country music and bluegrass vibe and McKenzie wanted to replicate singers such as Johnny Cash and George Jones. The transition to his own, sneering style started on second album The Way of the Racer. "Now it's not so much country. But I've still found my voice works better low down. I sing a bit more solidly down there."
And while there's a grandness to his vocals, there's also a sense that McKenzie doesn't take himself too seriously, something he likes to bring to the stage. "It's that sense of the theatrical or dramatic. If [I'm] going to do something in front of people I want it to be more than just me up there being myself. I'd probably just stare at my shoes if I was being myself."
If that's an indication of modesty, it's not the only one. He says he doesn't sing while he paints. "I do if there's no one else around. Or if friends are helping, it's usually to try and make them laugh."
And while he tends to hide behind metaphors - the band's consistent references to racing, for instance - he's happy to explain them. He likes country songs "because they're not obscure and you can hear what is being said. They're sung in a way that's meant to be heard. There's no very loud singing and there's no vocal gymnastics. It's all serving the song.
"Bands are always searching for something different. I thought a racing country band would be pretty much its own genre. There wouldn't be anyone else doing that."
So Low Rider isn't about jeans, then?
"When I wrote that I was starting to get, not obscure, but to write less words but to make them more useable in different ways," he says of the song that could otherwise have appeared on the Dazed and Confused soundtrack (no it doesn't quite have the funk of the War classic but it's as cool and snakey as Matthew McConaughey in the film).
"I was inspired by this big thunderstorm that came over Wellington. It just looked like there was a line of light below it and this big, dark, looming thing and you know the way the air feels when there's a storm coming. It's more electric than usual. Obviously there was the initial idea that boy-racers lower their cars and it's the same with racecars - when they hit the ground you see sparks coming out from underneath. On top of that, it's referring to the lowness of the people that are causing the wars to happen around the place. I don't know if that makes sense as a song but that's what it was about for me."
It's not the only song that's a product of McKenzie's deep thinking. Satellite Camera, one of a handful of peppier tunes, started with a visual of flags at the racetrack. That inspired thoughts of the United Nations, which led to the satellite reference, "getting an overview of looking at everything that happens, everything is being watched or reported or recorded or somehow noted.
"I did philosophy at university and that led me to have to think about a few things. "It certainly means I'm not going to write something too obvious that might be wrong. I wouldn't want to do something naively and 10 years later cringe and think, 'Oh my God, why did I say that'"
LOWDOWN
Who: Grand Prix
Albums: Racing Lines (2002), The Way of the Racer, (2005) Terraplane Twilight (2007)
Where and when: Wine Cellar tonight; October gigs announced soon
