Nothing Stands Still
by Mike Hall
Mike Hall’s name perhaps doesn’t come with immediate recognition, and the deliberately nondescript cover of this debut solo album – where he engages the camera with disconcerting passivity – probably doesn’t help. But the Auckland bassist, singer, songwriter and session musician has a career going back to hardcore punks Balance (three albums from the mid-1990s).
He also thought beyond thrash noise because he played with the Brunettes, appearing on their tastefully twee debut Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks (2002), contributing bass, flute and harmonium.
Then he was in the very successful Pluto (three albums, including the big-selling Pipeline Under the Ocean), played bass and flute on Dimmer’s I Believe You Are a Star (2001), and launched Nightchoir (two albums) with former Pluto members Matthias Jordan (keyboards) and drummer Michael Franklin-Browne.
Along the way, Hall has worked with SJD, Tami Neilson, The Bads, Tim Finn, Dave Dobbyn and many more. These days, he’s playing classic rock albums with the Liberty Stage Come Together Band.
So, Hall is seasoned, connected and can call on excellent peers (Jordan, multi-instrumentalist Jol Mulholland, drummer Alistair Deverick of the Ruby Suns, guest guitarist Brett Adams of The Bads) for this album of polished, understated pop-rock recorded over a couple of years.
Hall eases into the airy, romantic ballad Everything, then the fragile lament Good Will (with tasteful harmonies) and the glistening guitars of Shortest Straw. The album offers chiming power pop (the Dwight Twilley-like The Sun Never Came Up) and serves up the deliciously woozy Time, which lets guitarist Adams off the leash.
An unhurried album like Nothing Stands Still doesn’t draw attention to itself, but the understated craft and adult sensibilities deserve a mature mainstream audience.
Monkey
by Al Park
Christchurch local hero Al Park has been a mainstay in bands for decades, has run venues and worked at Echo Records.
Five years ago, Delaney Davidson, Anita Clark (aka Motte), Jordan Luck, Marlon Williams, Barry Saunders and other luminaries recorded an album of Park’s songs, Better Already.
Park’s haphazard music career embraced punk, soul, folk and rock, and this album of nine originals opens with the Northern soul stomper All the Love I Have, the good-time shuffle of Party and then excavates a hitherto unreleased song, Get Vandalised, by his late 1970s punk rock band The Vandals.
Elsewhere, the album makes a virtue of Park’s tarnished vocals on the back-porch laziness of Don’t Be Shy and in the cracked late-period Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson emotions of Don’t Tell Me Your Story. The eight minute-plus Signpost is a mythic, Dylanesque narrative.
The best are two weary and reflective songs: the cigarettes’n’whisky ballad Careless Love and especially the intimate Twilight Hour, which, in the keyboard backdrop from Adam Hattaway, taps the downbeat street soul mood of Southside Johnny and Springsteen ballads: “My dreams have changed, I’m in the twilight hour.”
Or maybe his hour has come.
Incidentally, the album’s full title is One For the Dog, One For the Cat and One For the People with a Monkey on Their Back.
Hall’s album is available digitally, on CD and vinyl. Park’s is available digitally and on CD.
