Outside the yellow submarine

SEA MOUSE: Don't let the name fool you. Wellington trio make a mighty but musical roar with their high energy sound and catchy tunes. Picture supplied

Classic rock with instruments and face-melting guitar lead breaks comes this way with Wellington three-piece Sea Mouse. Mousey though is hardly an epithet that describes the trio's hard and fast sound that brings to mind bands such as Led Zeppelin and even Jane's Addiction.

Led Zeppelin is definitely an influence, says the band's singer/songwriter Seamus Johnson.

“My parents listened to a lot of blues, but as a teen I started listening to Led Zeppelin. I got sucked into that world of the early ‘70s, late ‘60s rock music.”

Try playing Sea Mouse's new album Tropical Fish, also the name of the tour that brings the trio to the Dome next week, first thing in the morning. It'll wake you up with more zest than a three-spoonful stove-top espresso.

“The album is the live show,” Johnson told creative hub The Incubator.

“It's not the other way around with us like it usually is — ‘band records album, band tours album'. This album was recorded after working these songs out live. We know how people react to these songs. It's time to share it with more people.”

Johnson has no particular axe to grind, statement to make or theme to follow in his songs.

“I draw everything from stuff that happens in life. I can be influenced by other artists when I listen to them.”

Vogons, track two on Tropical Fish, was inspired in part by Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Seeking to facilitate an intergalactic highway construction project for a hyperspace express route, beings race from planet Vogsphere were responsible for the destruction of the Earth in Adams' fiction.

“I was frustrated with bureaucracy at that time,” says Johnson.

“The Vogons are horrible beings. You can tell Douglas Adams doesn't like bureaucracy much.”

The song opens with Adele-like beats but that's as far as the comparison goes. The driving chords lift off with such manic power you feel the floorboards tremble under your feet.

The song Fire is harder to define but is probably as close to the deceptively hippie undersea world depicted in the poster and the blurb's description of the Sea Mouse sound as we're going to get. The band's “psychedelia infused take on garage rock” is neatly encapsulated in the poster's graphic in which a demonic, fanged, cat-like creature lurks beneath the brightly coloured tropical fish. A sunshiney, elbow-out-the-window, wind-in-your-hair sound we're familiar with in these parts features in Fire but it comes with grit, some almost rappy phrasing and, well, fire.

The band's name owes less to an imaginary aquamarine marsupial like, say, the sea monkeys that used to be advertised on the back of American comics. Sea Mouse is a play on Johnson's name. But at the rock/electronica/acoustic roots/pop Tuki festival in Wanaka earlier this month, a fan approached bass player and former Gisborne man Scott Maynard.

“She came up to him afterwards and said ‘are you one of those sea monkeys?'”, laughs Johnson.

Possibly a little too much psychedelia for one festival-goer.