Under the Surface
By No Cigar
When reviewing this local band’s menacingly chugging single Clean online, we noted they had two solid albums behind them and were not as risk averse as many of their peers.
Few bands would, for example, open their album with a nagging single pulsing note running through the first third of an uncomfortable song that isn’t in a hurry to establish a hook before it leans into the throat-gripping angst of Nirvana and early Radiohead.
That’s No Cigar’s uncompromising title track here before the catchy claustrophobia of Clean and shapeshifting Chantilly, named for the picturesque French town north of Paris where they wrote many of the Under the Surface songs.
Chantilly moves effortlessly from assertive rock to spacious balladry with chiming guitars as it candidly addresses career uncertainty: “Something better come from this … if it doesn’t, we’ll have wasted nearly all our golden years.”
For a rock band, No Cigar also default to more muted modes. Oh Behave and Problem could easily be explosive, but their downward mood adds dynamics to an album that rarely takes the easy route (the ominous Merci Merci), lets guitarist Josh Morrice strike effective solo shapes when required (the appropriately desperate sounding and gritty Ketamine) and indulges in chipping New Wave (Cherry Blossom Girl, their most straight-head pop-rock song).
Although singer Willy Ferrier’s peculiarly percussive delivery in places may dull the experience if taking Under the Surface in a single sitting, this smartly produced album confirms No Cigar are still willing to push themselves, even in sometimes familiar areas.
The//Glow
By Mild Orange
Dunedin-founded and globally ambitious, Mild Orange arrive at this fourth album of confidently assertive dream pop somewhere adjacent to The Church of the 1990s and Slowdive.
There can be a crystalline purity to Josh Reid’s guitar work, which creates lightly psychedelic shoegaze with an emphasis on melody and a widescreen production, as on the pastoral Rubicon and the glistening pop of My Light with its subtle influence from disco.
The band were originally the project of Reid and mainman Josh Mehrtens, who writes, sings, orchestrates, and has been the four-piece’s engineer and producer.
They neatly underplay their strengths in the discreet country influence on the shimmer’n’jangle of the romantically atmospheric Moonglade (“I’ve got a place in mind that can’t be seen in any city … moonglade on the lake”) and Searching For, which begins spare and up-close but steadily gets wind under its wings and lift-off in its cinematic second half: “I don’t know what we’ll find but I need you to help me fly.”
Recorded at studios in London, Wales, Perth and Taranaki, this is an album bathed in Mehrtens’s lyrics of natural imagery and hazy mysticism under an appropriate title.
When it’s not ablaze, as it mostly isn’t, The//Glow radiates a warm domesticity and soft brightness that they are taking to the UK and Europe in the coming months.
Lucky audiences.
These albums are available digitally and on vinyl.
No Cigar tour: Meow Nui, Wellington, November 7; Ngaio Marsh Theatre, Christchurch, November 8; Powerstation, Auckland, November 14.
