Elemental
By Fly My Pretties
Five years since their last album, the FMP collective helmed by Laughton Kora and Barnaby Weir manage yet another reinvention, with guests.
This seventh album moves from te reo Māori soul on Kāwai and Everflowing’s grinding downbeat rock (both with singer Aja) to groove-riding, hands-in-the-air dance pop (See Me Flying with Louis TM), and finger-snap/walking bass Peggy Lee sensuality (Red Flags with raunchy Taylah), and the incendiary Fire Fighting (Taylah again).
Message music, too: AIE, with Tawaz, is affirming for those who don’t have te reo; the bilingual Tie Together (with a jazz piano solo by Nigel Patterson) is about unifying people; and on the chugging rock of The Boldest Truth, acceptance of hard times.
Theatrical, skilfully arranged, spirited neo-soul – and more – with the FMP mark of quality.
Fly My Pretties play Isaac Theatre Royal, Christchurch, June 14.
Forest House
By Jenny Mitchell
The wind shift that brought country music to mainstream attention should favour Gore’s long-serving Jenny Mitchell. She won the Golden Guitar Award at 18, is popular in Australia (two Golden Guitar nominations), has an Aotearoa Music Award, for her 2018 album Wildfires, plays in Nashville and is currently touring Australia supporting Kasey Chambers.
This fourth album offers thoughtful and sometimes downbeat songs with a mature sensibility: the sensitive Little Less Lonely speaks of a young woman “in love with a girl she calls each night/and feels a little less lonely”; the bruised emotions and desert-wide sound of Wives Who Wait when the call is “a quarter-past overdue”; breakup ballad Square & Plain (“You were never the picture I had framed/so I guess I’m the only one to blame”).
With fiddle and a backbeat she takes a Kiwi sensibility to the Tennessee dancefloor (No Cash, No Meal), considers the tough life (Wildflower, with banjo), gets Tami-like on the thumping Southern soul of Where the Water’s Cold and offers refined poetic images in The Curse.
Adult stories, internal narratives, bare emotions and no boot-scootin’.
I’m Gorgeous
By Michael Llewellyn
Advance songs from this second album from Wellington singer-songwriter Llewellyn were so different – a croaky folk ballad, Pray For Rain, with an intermediate school choir, ragged guitar-driven blues-rock on The Fish Song – it was difficult to anticipate what might be coming.
The album provides no simple answer. Llewellyn’s baritone speak-sing delivery of his poetry and lyrics owes something to Leonard Cohen (The Red Shoes/Bring Me Water, Down by the Packs); then there’s the spooky The Lock, rolling indie-pop (Home Sometime), lo-fi rehearsal folk (In Ways) and the seductive Stalin, with singer Isabella Smith.
A thinking person’s singer-songwriter grappling with deep emotions and questions.
Michael Llewellyn Tour: Pearl Diver, Dunedin, June 19; Space Academy, Christchurch, June 21*; Dawn, Taranaki, June 26; The Yard, Raglan, June 27; Grey Lynn RSC, Auckland, June 28*; Meow, Wellington, July 3; Small Hall Sessions, Hawke’s Bay, July 4*; The Dome Cinema, Gisborne, July 5*
* with French For Rabbits
These albums are available digitally; Jenny Mitchell and Fly My Pretties also on CD and vinyl.
