Happy Dictator
by Gorillaz featuring Sparks
There are already people on the comments to the clip of this track patiently explaining the video and song title look influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s Nazi satire The Great Dictator. Given that the track by Damon Albarn’s animation-fronted band, features veteran synth-pop siblings Sparks, you might wonder if the Chaplin/Hitler thing is connected to Sparks’ Ron Mael, another man with a small, trim moustache as a trademark. The song is a mix of the duo’s eccentric electropop filtered through the big Gorillaz genre-blender and Sparks singer Russell Mael and Albarn in a call-and-response vocal on a track that will get toes tapping from Pyongyang to Moscow. – Russell Baillie
Lou Reed was My Babysitter
by Jeff Tweedy
As this column has noted before, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s forthcoming latest solo album is a triple. If it’s as fun and tangentially personal as this, it’s going to be something. A song that owes something to the Velvet Underground’s Rock & Roll, which followed Reed into his solo years, it’s Tweedy’s ode to hearing Reed at a young susceptible age and finding it just might have changed his life. Some of us can relate. In Wilco hand’s it might have become an art-rock odyssey. Solo, with some younger backers, it puts Tweedy back in the garage or basement club (see video below) and sounding more energised and urgent than he has for a while on the day-job. – Russell Baillie
Tragedy
by Paige
The third in a run of singles for Paige Tapara whose pretty, featherweight acoustic pop is finding audiences in the outside world – her debut EP went platinum in South Korea. This one, co-written with a couple of Australian songwriting guns reminds of the delicate melodic touch that Bic Runga had during her unplugged early days. Nice. – Russel Baillie
Drag
by Yumi Zouma
Judging by the sounds of this, the once meek and mild dreampop outfit – which originally hailed from Christchurch but now live around the world with this song recorded in Mexico City – Yumi Zouma are going big on their forthcoming album No Love Lost to Kindness. New song Drag pulls the lever marked “anthem” hard on every chorus. The press release cites quite a few 90s electro-grunge touchstones like Garbage and Stellar* and it lives up to them on a song that apparently came from singer Christie Simpson’s ADHD diagnosis. The track is a very lemonade result. – Russell Baillie
Something
by Echomatica
Although this Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland dream-pop band don’t try to reinvent the genre, the big guitar chords which open this and the synthscape which comes in are big hooks. The song takes off in an enjoyably familiar way, somewhere along the axis of the Dream Academy and the Sundays (whose influence seems quite prominent these days). It’s not as dark as their previous single Love Isn’t Always which we hailed. Two good early strikes for the self-titled debut album due October 10.
Haka Through the Pain
by Rei
The haka has figured as a backbone of much contemporary Māori pop, hip-hop, as well as Alien Weaponry’s speed metal. The approach of rapper-singer Rei and producer Chris Chetland might not be doing anything much that’s new, and they’re doing it bilingually with lyrics that are curious mix of the personal (“I’m a bougie Māori/I like bougie things...”) and the mildly political. But they sure do it at pace and efficiency that suggests this will be a risk to both the turf at Aotearoa summer festivals as well as European dancefloors. – Russell Baillie
The Gown
by The Bats
It’s been out a few weeks but The Bats aren’t putting new material on Spotify anymore and that was enough to make us reconsider using the platform as our only streaming option on this column. Especially when it was coupled with this untypical, brooding number which turns down the jangle factor and adds glacial and (probably synthesizer-generated) strings for an unsettling but quietly gripping song, the title of which suggests something worryingly medical. It’s from their Dunedin-recorded forthcoming 11th album, and its video features white frost. – Russell Baillie
Armies of the Lord
by The Mountain Goats
Bigger than a cult, hugely respected by musicians and sometimes flirting with mainstream attention, John Darnielle’s Mountain Goats are a bridge between literate and challenging folk-rock and – as here – ambitious story-telling. This song, with embellishment from strings and swirling horns, signals the forthcoming album Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan (November 7) which is a musical, here with harmonies from Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame. It’s a big conceptual piece and these five minutes – which open as a piano ballad before the upward trajectory – are stirring stuff. You have plenty of time to assimilate it and the album before concerts in Auckland and Wellington in April. – Graham Reid
The Magpies
by Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Alice Keath, Seraphim Trio
In 2019, Paul Kelly recorded the album Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds, not a bunch of wolf-whistling ditties but a set of ornithological poems he’d turned into songs. In a chat with the Listener at the time, he asked if one, The Magpies by NZ poet Denis Glover, was well known here. When informed it was, very, he laughed: “I’m in trouble now.” Kelly played the song during his NZ main-centre tour last week. At the Auckland show, he noted the Christchurch and Wellington audiences seemed to know the “quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle” birdcall lines better. Well, as we know from Footrot Flats, magpies do live in the back blocks. Anyway, for future singalongs we’ve included the 2019 version ahead of a re-recorded one that is on his forthcoming album Seventy. Can’t really complain about Aussie rock laureate converting a NZ poem to his own use. After all, magpies came from Oz and NZ-lit would be poorer without them. – Russell Baillie
Cups and Cakes
by Spinal Tap featuring Paul McCartney
Just like back when the original spoof rockumentary came out 41 years ago, we have to wait a few weeks for Spinal Tap II: The End Continues to release in NZ after opening this weekend to mixed reviews. There is, of course, an accompanying album, the fourth Spinal Tap long-player after the non-movie LPs Break Like the Wind from 1992 and Back from the Dead in 2009. True to the retro spirit of the new film, The End Continues album is old stuff with some occasional guest-star do-overs like the Elton John accompanied Stonehenge, and (Listen) to the Flower People. Now the daft Cups and Cakes, which was also the closing track from Dead, has Paul McCartney coming to tea and he’s brought the piccolo trumpet solo from Penny Lane with him. By the sounds of it Spinal Tap has become a parody even of themselves. And The Rutles’ lawyers will, no doubt, be in touch. Trivia: It might be Sir Elton and Sir Paul but Spinal Tap, of course, has Nigel Tufnel played by Christopher Guest, otherwise known as Lord Haden-Guest, the 5th Baron Haden-Guest. So, in rock he is a man without peer. – Russell Baillie
