The Coolies heat up summer

TOO COOL: The Coolies, a three-piece, all-female act bring their punk pop rock sound to Gisborne next month. Picture supplied

One who does heavy work for little pay is a definition that pops up when googling The Coolies. The phrase could apply to the punk pop rock sound the three-piece who perform for free in Gisborne next month.

The all-female act mash together dance, punk and pop with an unorthodox line-up of guitar, keyboard and drums.

“The Coolies have been blurting out random batches of high order avant garage spew since 1997,” writes rock reviewer Byron Coley.

The Coolies were ostensibly a “punk” unit, but their sound was never doctrinaire, he says.

“Through sheer weirdness and strength of vision, they created music that paralleled aspects of underground noise from the forests of Olympia Washington, the squats of West London, and the basements of Dunedin.

“Without resorting to formal revisionism, they’ve managed to take the basics of the early Rough Trade sound and smudge it with fingers dipped in the art-readymades of NZ’s underground pop groups and their own fevered experimentalism.”

That fevered experimentalism includes the demo song the trio recorded on a dictaphone and sent straight to Number One on the bFM charts before they released their album Kaka.

The Coolies began in the early 2000s with three teenage school chums Tina, SJ and Melissa and their signature Ronettes /Riot Grrl /Ramones-type punk, rock’n’roll sound. That sound was apparently not widely popular in Manurewa at the time. In the city though they reportedly built up a cult following and played support for international acts such as Beastie Boys, Peaches and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

The Coolies have played the Big Day Out, as well as Austin, Texas’s, South by South West music festival.

Leaning towards a more post-punk The Fall/Skeptics type sound mixed with their own led to the 2010 LP, Master. Since then The Coolies reckon they have been sipping martinis and living their best lives. Right now they are recording a tour EP and their next album before they tour Europe next year.

Before they go, catch The Coolies at Dome garden bar on January 11 at 9pm.