For NZ Music Month, we're asking local musicians to tell us about the New Zealand songs they love the most. Today, I.E. Crazy's Claire Duncan fills us in on a few of her favourites.
Photo: Veronica Crockford-Pound and Joseph Griffen
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Sharpie Crows - Country Music
Emerging from a mist of shoegaze in my early twenties, I yearned to discover a stronger mode of communication. I wanted to hear music that was extreme - verbose, vocal, noisy, dictatorial, autocratic and demanding. After years of retrograde dabbling in NZ post-punk via Skeptics and The Gordons and similar scary-folk stories with The Drones in Australia, I first listened to Sharpie Crow’s Mole Music double EP Golf Course/Mass Grave in my bedroom between lectures in 2010.
Here was a band that sounded like it spoke - a mass of contradictions. It was discordant, melodic, eloquent, arousing, emasculating, searing and sha-la-la-ing, disorientating and direct. It tapped into my social inadequacy, political despair and psychological precarity like nothing so close to home had before. The line - “How can we make country music when there’s no country anymore?” - pointed directly to my creative and more largely pressing postcolonial anxieties around New Zealand identity.
I’ve since done the dishonourable thing of pestering some of these people into some kind of familiar relationship and they’ll probably reprimand me or blush like schoolboys when they see this. They deserve it.
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Headless Chickens - Mr Moon / This Kind of Punishment - The Sleepwalker
I was born in 1987 in Auckland, which means I grew up watching the Pulp Sunday Top 40, iceTV, Space, m2, C4, and whatever other free-to-air music shows/channels I could dry my eyeballs to ‘til the wee hours of the morning. Headless Chickens were one of the first local bands on TV that I remember liking as a kid; they were a kind of psychedelic trip-hop clowning troupe complete with crazy hooks, colourful videos and a singer with the face of a children’s TV presenter.
My favourite Chickens song was the haunting Mr Moon, released in 1991 when I was four. But as I only recently learned, the blueprint for Mr Moon was created back in 1984 by This Kind of Punishment (featuring one of my favourite songwriters, Peter Jefferies, a Taranaki music teacher whose Wikipedia page actually describes him as “sassy”) with HC singer Chris Matthews, under the title of The Sleepwalker.
It’s lyrically and sonically worlds apart; mournful with longing (“I wouldn't give you the time of day / But you come to take it anyway… I crush snow on my face, it feels like leather…”), and locally nuanced with the drawn out, swampy feeling you can only suffer living in a tiny, waterlogged place like New Zealand (“I’ll wait here til the cows come down the river”). It infinitely outstrips the HC version, maybe unless you’re drunk on a dancefloor, and probably not even then. Cat Power took it for a spin too, in 1995, and it's not great. I’m sure they’re grateful for the royalties.
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Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing - Scrying
Some months ago, I spoke to my most eccentric i.e. interesting Uncle about GPOGP and how they make me feel live. An avid record collector and once a regular at venues around Auckland, he admitted he rarely goes to shows at all anymore, for fear of feeling too much. I recommended he go to a GPOGP show and immediately regretted it, fearing for his psycho-spiritual health. GPOGP transcend the intellectual and social pretentiousness of being a “band” on a “stage” to create a kind of bestial swirl of body and spirit. It’s confounding, strange, comforting, immediate, otherworldly, erotic, animal... ushering in experiences of both intense euphoria and despair.
Scrying is a particular recorded favourite from their most recent record Scrying in Infirmary Architecture. There’s a desperately melodic sensibility shrouded in dour difficulty; sugar and spike. The members of this group are among the most creatively ambitious and compelling people I’ve encountered, both within and beyond music. They have won my soul. Youth church leaders from days of yore are praying for me.
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Mutton Birds - A Thing Well Made
The plainly descriptive opening lines of this song ("she’s wearing her don’t talk to me face / as she makes the kids' lunches / I oblige and quietly shut the front door / as I leave") sum up most mornings of my childhood, and quickly taught me more about masculinity than any NZ history paper I’ve ever sat has dared to.
I’d always known this track as ‘the Aramoana song’, but it took lying in the dark in a shitty leaking Eden Terrace flat pondering the emotional repression and creative depression of almost everyone I know to realise the song is not just about David Gray. It speaks to a taciturn workaday masculinity that sees sadness, anger and desire metamorphose into objects and activities. ‘There’s connection, there’s completeness, when a man holds a thing well made.’
The narrative deploys a string of seemingly everyday events heavily loaded with the sinister lurk of potential violence - way to remind listeners of their animality by referring to “their breakfast still warm inside them”. It’s a reminder that the breaking point between civilised sanity and brutal disorder is not just close to the surface, it is in the surface itself. The real genius in this song is how the form imitates the content - the song never ruptures, never topples over; it’s delicately restrained throughout, and the damaging events it implicitly points to are never made clear.
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Seth Frightening - Bury
I first heard Seth Frightening back around 2008 when my friend Matthew Crawley linked me to a handful of tracks on MySpace. When Seth came up to Auckland to do some shows, we performed together, the first of countless future shows over years to come. I bought his first record, The Prince & His Madness, and listened to it unrepentantly. I took it away over a long weekend camping with my then prospectively future in-laws, and quietly constructed a parallel fan-girl reality in which Seth Frightening thought I was the most interesting woman in the world.
This song, Bury (from his most recent LP But We Love Our Brothers and Sisters) hangs particularly heavy on my shoulders; it lumbers with the weight of existential longing (“I feel foolish for wanting something from all this nothingness”) and the delicious, delicate threads of sprites teasing from some kind of melancholic afterlife (“could I be soaking in awe? / shuffling with that slipstream / safe in synchronicity”). It’s a perfectly impossible marriage of folk and experimental; ranging from chaotic, crushing epics to jarringly sparse acoustic arrangements. I have little idea even now what makes this music as magical as it is. My envy of his talent is usurped only by my love of it.
