William Dart looks at local music determined to find its way into your mind - new releases from Mermaidens and Purple Pilgrims and a CD of classic Kiwi ad jingles.
Photo: Supplied
With a mysterious sitar working its wiles, is John Donoghue trying to take over our minds in this 1972 single?
It's one of 27 Kiwi psychedelic trips that Grant Gillanders put together for a CD aptly titled A Day in My Mind’s Mind.
In fact, serious mind control wasn’t on Timberjack Donoghue’s agenda back then. This musical mesmerism of sitar turned out to be window dressing for a rather sweet little heart-plead.
Jump ahead almost half a century and we find that some local musicians are trying to burrow away into our hearts, souls, and minds.
A new album by Mermaidens came sealed with a sticker describing it as a “lively 9-track inferno for your mind” … songs that explore power and control in a confronting new lens . . . from a trio that focuses on the gatekeepers and dominators of the world, dissecting their power, one song at a time.
Might any but the staunchest minds cope with such lofty ambitions, one wonders. But then Gussie Larkin, Lily West and Abe Hollingsworth are no strangers to the intense. Three years ago, the title track of their debut album, 'Undergrowth', was almost hypnotically so.
How does Mermaidens' new album, titled Look Me In The Eye, live up to what could be either promises, warnings or threats? Are these gatekeepers and dominators of the world going to be named and shamed, or are we just talking of an unsympathetic boss in a song like 'Crying in the Office'?
Unfortunately, with words rather challenging to pick up, one looks for and finds rewards in clever instrumental play, with shifty, volatile time signatures.
Then there’s the brooding few minutes of the track 'Millennia'. A song by Lily West that addresses the toll that the iniquitous internet exacts, on women in particular.
A short introduction, with vocals doing a pretty good impression of a Stepford wife, sets the scene. The main body of the song makes its point against a relentless instrumental criss-cross, building up to its crucial line.
For me, it’s the almost deadpan delivery of a song like 'Millennia' that keeps my mind safe from total surrender.
And the same thing has happened for me with some of the band’s live performances. Although here, there is a visual dynamic that assists involvement with two woman, one playing guitar, the other bass, flanking a man with drumsticks, keeping the song on wheels.
Without supportive video visuals, the Mermaiden's song that makes the deepest inroads into my consciousness is 'She’s Running'. A brisk tempo helps, with turn-on-a-dime drumming from Hollingsworth, sometimes in sharp synchronicity with West’s bass.
Gussie Larkin has talked about how the number itself was inspired by a stressful childminding experience, giving her a new awareness of parental pressures and responsibilities. Caught or almost imaged perhaps in the song’s clever vocal play and intricate layerings.
Mermaidens are one of the premier bands on the current Flying Nun roster and so too are Purple Pilgrims, the working name for two sisters, Valentine and Clementine Nixon. And beware — these two women do intend, I think, to sneak into your mind, when your resistance is low.
The Nixons’ background is quite something. There’s a bit of a folkish tradition in the family and also a streak of gypsy blood. Being brought up in Hong Kong meant they were also exposed to exotic sounds and cultures way beyond the confines of your local bring-your-own-guitar folk club. And it was one of their performances to a Hong Kong avant-garde audience that got them noticed by Ariel Pink who organized a tour of the States for them in 2013.
Yet their first album, when it appeared just three years ago, had been recorded in a Coromandel cottage, during what sounds like a bit of a spirit-enchancing getaway. But not so rustic that it couldn’t accommodate their analogue synthesisers.
The name of this first album, Eternal Delight, provides an instant critical reaction. I was totally captivated by the whirling spaciness of a number like 'Orbit You', built up around an insistent five-note theme that reminded me of Coconut Rough’s 1983 hit, 'Sierra Leone'.
My initial enchantment hasn’t dampened with Purple Pilgrims’ new album, Perfumed Earth.
Its opening track, 'How Long is Too Long' being such high-class musical ensnarement that you quickly realize that a modest 1’37” certainly leaves you wanting more.
The Nixon sisters are happy to let their songs simmer in simplicity, and not get waylaid by harmonic adventuring.
'Ancestors Watching', for example, is spun out over a pair of chords, albeit a good one. The second chord subtly changes from major to minor as the song progresses. It’s significant this, as, when the chord is major, it introduces a fleeting sensation of a change of key, a twist in direction which never happens. We’re safely cocooned within its images of an all-sufficient merging of rivers and seas.
Two verses only move away from the women’s mesmeric couplets, and these present some pretty intense soul-gazing, with turns of phrases that recall the high and heady days of the original Summer of Love.
Which is fine by me. Stuck as we are in a rather grim 2019, the thought of being transcendentally transient seems an attractive proposition.
Perhaps these samplings of Mermaidens and Purple Pilgrims haven’t engaged with everyone’s mind to the degree that was hoped for. But there are music, musicians and writers whose prime purpose is to make that very direct contact and make it within the 30 or 60 seconds of a commercial.
We may groan when a loop of Lou Reed’s 'Walk on the Wild Side' plays under a television car ad, or, on home ground, when Chris Knox’s 'Not Given Lightly' is still the background for a new half-minute clip advertising Vogel's bread.
Yet some celebrity ads have garnered the sort of cult status that has seen them made being available on CD — or, in the case of Coca Cola — two CDs.
Who might have thought that the Queen of Soul herself would front up for the beverage on more than one occasion, this one ending with her celebrity status being sealed with a sponsor’s salute. As if anyone could mistake the one and only Aretha Franklin.
Back in the seventies, Warner/Reprise made available two commericals that Van Dyke Parks had done in 1967, one for Datsun, the other for Ice Capades.
The second was a particularly slippery outing on Moog synthesizer from a man more accustomed to pianos, be they honky tonk or grand. Later he’d explain it as an act of counter-culturalism, undertaken to prove that he could be just as popular as anyone else. Better still, in 2011, he made its 45 seconds available to fans on his Arrangements Vol 1 CD.
Now, in dear old New Zealand, thanks to the indefatigable Grant Gillanders, in a release on Frenzy Music Records, titled And Now a Word from our Sponsor, we have 70 years of classic Kiwi ads in 99 tracks.
And you’re barely in before Pat McMinn, our homegrown Doris Day of TANZA fame, is telling us where to go for dentures with help from Lee Humphries. The address later ended up being the first Queen Street home of Real Groovy Records.
[Editor's Note: From this point on in William's programme, he plays several more delightful Kiwi ad jingles, which you'll have to catch in the audio for the programme]
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'Dahli Mohammed' (Donahue) – Timberjack Donahue
A Day in My Mind’s Mind, Vol 2
(EMI)
'Undergrowth' (Mermaidens) – Mermaidens
Undergrowth
(Flying Nun)
'Crying In The Office' (Mermaidens) – Mermaidens
Look Me In The Eye
(Flying Nun)
'Millennia' (Mermaidens) – Mermaidens
Look Me In The Eye
(Flying Nun)
'She's Running' (Mermaidens) – Mermaidens
Look Me In The Eye
(Flying Nun)
'Orbit You' (Purple Pilgrims) – Purple Pilgrims
Eternal Delight
(Not Not Fun)
'How Long Is Too Long' (Purple Pilgrims) – Purple Pilgrims
Perfumed Earth
(Flying Nun)
'Ancestors Watching' (Purple Pilgrims) – Purple Pilgrims
Perfumed Earth
(Flying Nun)
'Things Go Better with Coca Cola' (Anon) – Aretha Franklin
Coca Cola Commercials
(Coca Cola)
'Ice Capades (Moog Music '67)' (Parks) – Van Dyke Parks
Arrangements Volume 1
(Bananastan)
'Broke my Dentures' (Montrose) – Pat McMinn
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'The 10th of July this year' (Anon) – Gwynne Owen
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'L'amour Est l'enfant De La Liberte' (Smith) – The Rumour
The Rumour: Collection
(Ode)
'Barton's Pure Fruit Juice' (Smith) – Shade Smith
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'Soda Stream' (Daverne) – Annie Crummer
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'Pop a Peanut' (Calhoun, Alexander) – Tim Finn, Eddie Rayner and Don McGlashan
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'Clubcard' (Killip) – Jacqui Fitzgerald
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'NZ Pork' (-) – (Anonymous)
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
'CBA Bank' (Gillett) – The Chicks
And Now a World from Our Sponsor
(Frenzy Music)
