Life Advice
By Soft Bait
This Auckland four-piece have refined the art of saying and playing less, but tighter, on this mightily impressive second album. Their pared-back, fist-tight New Leaf is a serious contender for single of the year.
Even more than on the menacing Killing Time and Sleep from their 2022 Plot Points debut, vocalist Joshua Hunter has distilled intimidating masculinity for New Leaf and then again on the switchblade speak-sing attack of Long Line, the singer’s dysfunctional persona attributed to a lineage of misfits and arguments.
Elsewhere are the explosive relentlessness of Highly Recommended (“these things I like came highly recommended”) and the Iggy Pop-like energy of TNT and Neighbourhood.
Soft Bait skewer empty language (phatic communion the linguists call it) on the cynical Applause; take on hearsay, rumours and misinformation (New Leaf); emotional entropy (the defeatist Oh Well with “they can’t be helped … same old story”) and real estate sales pitches playing on “lifestyle” cliches (Safe As Houses). All this is delivered over a well-drilled machine of Patrick Hickley’s hardened guitar riffs, Cameron Mackintosh’s pugilistic drumming and Keria Paterson’s bass.
If there’s a same-same quality to Soft Bait’s sound, it only adds to the power and impact of these discrete songs cannoning off each other.
All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985
By various artists
If the phlegm and fury of British punk was sometimes so angry as to be inchoate, synth-pop emerging around the same time(ish) was often deliberately cool, detached and slightly sterile because of the technology that created it. And it respected the pop end of the equation.
Gary Numan took Are Friends Electric? and the emotional isolationism of Cars to the charts: “Here in my car I feel safest of all, I can lock all the doors, it’s the only way to live.”
This compilation of “junkshop synth pop” features mostly British and North American acts, but includes a Kiwi entry: Do You Read Me by Space Waltz’s Alastair Riddell. Lifted from his 1983 solo album, it’s one of the more fully realised synth-pop tracks here, and that’s Riddell on the album’s cover.
Here were artists exploring the new, relatively cheap technology, and many songs are musically reductive, with automaton/monotone vocals and telling titles: Alien Girl, I Tune Into You, Science Fiction, I’m a Computer, I Am a Timebomb (excellent jerky pop from Peta Lily and Michael Process) …
Most of these artists disappeared quickly: The Goo-Q, Gerry and the Holograms, Billy London (with a detached Lou Reed-like delivery on the minimalist Woman), Incandescent Luminaire, Microbes (“I am a computer don’t let me overheat”) and Selwin Image (here with a collision of identikit Chinn-Chapman glam-era pop and early Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark on The Unknown) are hardly household names.
An enjoyable, dated and patchy collection of twiddly, obscure computer pop for the curious.
Life Advice available digitally and on vinyl. All the Young Droids available digitally in an 11-song edition, or as 24 songs on double vinyl and double CD.
