The New Zealand quartet fronted by singer-songwriter Elizabeth Stokes return with a fourth LP of particularly strong, warm, cleverly nuanced, poignant indie numbers spanning contradictory pulls of emotion and expanded sounds and production. There’s a deceptive simplicity to the Auckland band songs - the opener and title track begins with a false start with the spoken apology “sorry I was thinking about something else” and that common studio occurrence is cleverly left in, not only to keep a freshness, immediacy and live feel to the record, but also as a signpost of a recurring theme - of divided thoughts and feelings. On that catchy track the jaunty chorus includes the lines “I thought I was getting better / But I'm back to where I started / And the straight line was a circle/ Yeah, the straight line was a lie.” Similarly the upbeat sounding, rocky single No Joy has a maze of push-and-pull complexity in apparently simple but clever, punchy lyrics: “All my pleasures, guilty / Clean slate looking filthy/ This year’s gonna kill me, gonna kill me/ Spirit should be crushing / But I don’t feel sad, I feel nothing.” The jangly Metal is a lovely extended metaphor about all key minerals in our body (“So you need the metal in your blood to keep you alive”) wonderfully bringing a complex biological and emotional balance into effervescent sounds and simple terms: “And I know I’m a collaboration / Bacteria, carbon and light / A florid orchestration/ A recipe of fortune and time.” Mosquito, meanwhile is a powerful, poignant climate change number describing a tranquil creek where Stokes would walk, but “In January '23 / The creek became a raging sea / A grеat torrential flood / That ripped the bridgеs from the base”, and “Leave me here on the stone / I'm only here to feed mosquitoes / Only skin, only blood / A little less now than there was.” The middle of the album contains quieter, more acoustic numbers including Mother, Pray For Me, filled with torn emotions and guilt, while the final track return to the pacier and more upbeat. Ark of the Covenant and Best Laid Plans particular bring in expanded sounds, with production from guitarist Jonathan Pearce, the former lyricalluyusing a subterranean discovery to capture other divided states of mind: “Seeking the evil part of me / That pulls me out of humanity / The more I look, the more I find / Turn a corner in a cave and discover a goldmine … And if I go digging, I'll never stop / Fossilised nightmares in every spot / Ancient pottery filled with fault / And the negative space that held my soul.” Deceptively simple as an indie formula, but rich in image and emotional complexity, a fabulous exposition of songwriting and delivery. Out on ANTI- Records.
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