Bots
By Pickle Darling
Adopting a name combining the astringent and affectionate, Christchurch’s Lukas Mayo (they/them) has quietly built a carefully curated catalogue of fragile-sounding albums where songs rarely breach three minutes. They have often been delicate, fey and charming miniatures brought to life through glockenspiel, soft guitar, keyboards and samples. These small, self-contained songs were often delivered with what could seem like studied diffidence and earned the slightly disparaging description “cardigan pop”.
But this alt-folk fourth album finds three of the eight songs at five minutes-plus, only two of them less than two minutes long.
Violence Voyager (“It’s time to reconnect, but sadly this summer I can’t as I’ve got to work”) develops subtle pop shapes, Human Bean Instructional Manual has internal quirkiness and a delightfully airy jangle, and the sparse, typically lo-fi Massive Everything – considering that uncertain cusp of adulthood when everything ahead seems overwhelming – gets almost funky.
The eggshell-walk of the opener Obsolete starts with a spoken word sample and an atmospheric pillow of synths before their late-arriving first words: “For your consideration. I’m trying my damn hardest to not disappoint again. But I still do.”
Not true: this is a sometimes beguiling album of considerable, but deflecting, ambition.
Straight Line Was A Lie
By The Beths
The Beths’ trajectory – from student radio in 2018 to RNZ National in 2022, when Jesse Mulligan described them as the station’s favourite band, then global recognition – could be a roadmap for others.
Their Future Me Hates Me (2018) and Jump Rope Gazers (2020) delivered exuberant, economical pop-rock with reference points in powered-up New Wave and alt-rock. By Expert in a Dying Field (2022), singer Liz Stokes was writing smart, self-deprecating and sometimes anxious lyrics as their musical palette broadened incrementally.
This fourth album finds them shifting again. Their alt-rock signature is intact on No Joy but with lyrics probing something beyond youthful excitement: “All my pleasures, guilty. Clean slate looking filthy. This year’s gonna kill me, gonna kill me” with a chorus of “no joy, no joy”.
The fiery Ark of the Covenant and poppy throb of Take are concert-ready crowd-pleasers; Metal, a likeable slice of Bangles-like jangle-pop.
But Stokes’ soul-baring Mother, Pray For Me is an arresting solo piece (“so hard to write,” she told the Listener) about a desperate search for connection with a parent, reaching across the divide of past hurts: “I would like to know you and I want you to know me. Do we still have time? Can we try?”
Elsewhere there’s the slow, thoughtful build of Mosquitos in which Stokes escapes to a nearby creek for space and solace with Auckland’s January 2023 floods as a metaphor of sudden change. Til My Heart Stops is equally restrained, Roundabout and the brooding Best Laid Plans benefit from the spacious production by guitarist Jonathan Pearce.
Straight Line Was a Lie, if not as immediate in visceral impact as its predecessors, reveals a more melodic and reflective Beths. As if anticipating what others could learn from them, they’ve mapped out how to grow with your changing self.
