Feral Child (UK) / Flying Nun (New Zealand)
Although some of us have been belatedly burrowing intensively into rich sonic seams from New Zealand’s far corner of the world – most notably bands of a certain vintage connected with the extended Flying Nun Records family — there’s a lot we still don’t know enough about. Enter then Vor-stellen to help deepen this discovery-making, an intriguing still-new ensemble to be kept pace with, in real instead of retrospective time.
With past and present lives in The Subliminals, the sub-editor-aggravating avoid!avoid and other musical operations between them, NZ scene veterans Brendan Moran (drums, piano, guitar, synths), Steve Reay (guitar, synths, vocals), Jared Johanson (bass) and Pascal Roggen (electric violin), manifest as a super-group of a kind on the newly-dispensed Armature For A Painting.
Last year’s Flying Nun-facilitated debut double-album – Parallelograms — cut by a trio incarnation of the band, was a stellar starting point. Through an adroit application of bone-dry Steve Albini-indebted production values around entrancing composites of Spiderland angularity and NEU!-infused motorik, it presented four more-than satisfying vinyl-side-each sprawlers. This single-LP sequel set – co-released by Flying Nun and the UK’s currently on a roll Feral Child Recordings – transcendentally augments the extant templates. Side A’s near-eighteen-minute “Eternal Return Of The Transient Organ” is worth the admission price alone, as an epic but never ponderous or bloated affair. The piece glides along gloriously, with a core combination of hypnotic drums, throbbing bass and insistent piano lines overlaid with tiers of fizzing synths, twinning guitars, gradually mutating violin lines and Reay’s somewhat elusive tones. The net outcome envisages a time-travelled-enabled collaboration between the late Jaki Liebezeit, John Cale, The For Carnation, Nils Frahm and assorted members of Tortoise. Yes — it’s that good.Contrastingly, the seemingly Roggen-less flipside “Grendel” is a radically different proposition across its sixteen or so minutes duration. Whilst there remains a kosmische-meets-post-rock pulse through its pumping heart, the rhythms are much more aggressively thickened, as multiple layers of squalling six-strings and more intense yet still half-buried vocals lead the fray, to imagine a darkly mesmeric distillation of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, the most EQ-bending passages within Mercury Rev’s Boces and Shellac’s At Action Park.
Taking the awesome Armature For A Painting as a whole, you will struggle to find such a near-perfect pairing of blissfulness and dissonance released in 2024. More of this sort thing please, Vor-stellen.-Adrian-
