All I Need
by Bret McKenzie
Three years after his slightly serious, very Californian, debut solo album Songs Without Jokes, Bret McKenzie is returning with a second, Freak Out City due out mid-August. First comes All I Need, a love song, says the publicity, for his wife Linda … ah, sorry, Hannah … just got distracted by the very Paul McCartney bit in the middle after the song starts with a groove that’s a slowed down Get Back. But it’s a big warm fuzzy number which McKenzie and backers take beyond hand-me-down Fab-ness, complete with brass and singalong outro.
While as with his previous album, there’s a fair few LA session musicians on the new one, it seems this song was done by McKenzie and his Wellington backers, the State Highway Wonders, who appear in the video below. Any resemblance between guitarist Justin Clarke to the Muppet bassist Floyd Pepper is just a coincidence, ok? McKenzie and band are at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse on June 18 and June 19, as part of the city’s Lōemis festival. – Russell Baillie
Buddha (Forget You)
by Kirsten Morrell
Former Goldenhorse frontwoman signals a long overdue second solo album Morrellium – her debut Ultraviolet was in 2010 – due later this year. This is an enjoyable four minutes of bouncy electropop which follows her more funky and slinky Avignon single last year. The opera-trained artist still has that lovely pure tone and – when necessary – high range. Catchy. – Graham Reid
Massive Everything
By Pickle Darling
Once described as a purveyor of “cardigan pop” for their lo-fi, miniature bedroom songs, Christchurch’s Pickle Darling (Lukas Mayo) has gone epic for this five minute-plus track consisting of synths, drum machine and a lazily understated melody. Mayo charms on a barely sung piece which sounds simple but has clever changes as instruments and voices come and go. Not so much a love song as a song about love. Early promise really flowering. – Graham Reid
Wither
by Somebody Do Something
Christchurch band weigh in with a chipper slice of soulful pop lead by singer Marlee Fay and coloured with sax and violin. It’s a slippery tune of distinct movements which thickens up with rock guitars while dealing with questions of how we should spend this life. Clubland soul-pop which suggests jazz aspirations. – Graham Reid
Lotus
by Little Simz, Michal Kiwanuka, Yussef Dayes
The title track to the British rapper’s sixth album is among a string of laid-back songs that contrast with the urgent, Afro beats of singles Flood and Lion. That’s helped by the presence of the ever-unhurried Michal Kiwanuka whose soul-folk vocals offering a balm to Ms Simz’s simmering rage about what’s expected of her as a public figure, and the playing of English jazz drumming star Yussef Dayes, which takes this track somewhere cinematic. – Russell Baillie
Deep End
by The Lemonheads
Recent NZ visitor Evan Dando of the Lemonheads has, since the 1990s, been a casualty of his early success (with his blend of alt-rock and pop melodies) and his penchant for the excesses that fame allowed him. He has long promised a new album but at last seems to be moving towards one with this gritty single (guitar by J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.) and its simultaneously released melancholy country-flavoured ballad Sad Cinderella with Juliana Hatfield which invokes the spirit of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.
Recent shows suggest Dando is steering a surer course and these two songs from the impending Love Chant album hint that it could be a long overdue return to form. – Graham Reid
The Deadpan Break
by T.G. Shand
Annemarie Duff who is T. G. Shand – formerly of Melbourne-based cinematic shoegaze/electronica band Miniatures – and based in Christchurch now offers pulsing electropop with a smart, dreamy psychedelic touch in the coda (are they backward drums?) which owes as much to 1967 as it does the 1990s. Whispery middle-ground vocals add an extra allure of mystery. Niceness. – Graham Reid
Sentio
by Rhian Sheehan and Arli Liberman
The producer supergroup of Sheehan and Liberman don’t so much release a single here but offer another luscious slice of atmospheric ambience in advance of their Traces album out later this year.
This follows their rather lovely Immaru atmospherics which has more unsettling directional shifts around Liberman’s glistening guitar. Both pieces are five minutes-plus so set your listening for meditative immersion and an out of body experience. Now, eyes closed, you are warm and weightless and floating through space . . . – Graham Reid
Ravel, Vocalise-étude en forme de Habanera
by Marianne Crebassa mezzo-soprano, Fazil Say piano
There’s an argument to be made that the Frenchman Ravel was the greatest Spanish composer of all. He grew up in the French Basque region near the Spanish border, and his mother was raised in Madrid. She would sing folksongs to young Maurice when he was a child, and that influence can be found peppered throughout Ravel’s career. He wrote this vocalise – wordless song – in 1907, a particularly Spanish year for Ravel. He also produced the opera L’Heure espagnole and began composing the great Rapsodie espagnole.
While the Rapsodie is among Ravel’s most lushly orchestral display pieces, the Vocalise is sparse, just voice and piano. As a result, it goes as close as anything Ravel composed to evoking the intensity of an Andalusian flamenco club. If, however, you just have to have a Spanish-influenced orchestral display piece, be sure to catch the biopic Bolero. It charts the creation of Ravel’s most famous work, and appears in this year’s French Film Festival, which runs nationwide until June 29. – Richard Betts
