Auckland

REVIEW: Fazerdaze - Morningside

Laura Kerry

Fazerdaze, AKA Amelia Murray, started a few years ago in the Wellington, New Zealand–born artist’s apartment in Auckland, where she was pursuing a degree in music. Murray’s path to her first LP, Morningside, is filled with many different apartments and rooms. Released on New Zealand’s legendary Flying Nun Records, her album is bedroom music in the truest sense—written, recorded, and produced in her home, where Murray says she is most comfortable with her art.

The term “bedroom pop” functions on multiple layers in Fazerdaze’s music; not only does it come from her bedroom, but it often addresses it, too. Murray’s songwriting contains the immediacy that comes from working out feelings through the act of creation. Much of that processing, like her music, seems to happen in the space of a room. “Are the walls getting closer as I’m getting closer to you?” she sings, conflating feelings and place before the release in the chorus of “Lucky Girl.” In “Half-Figured,” she sings, “In my room / I’m so consumed by things that haven’t happened yet,” enacting the “over-thinking” that she describes throughout the song.

Beyond those two songs and the confines of her four walls, Murray displays a self-deprecating, self-reflective streak in her lyrics that is oddly charming. “Don’t you know I’m shit at having friends / I’m sorry I can only do my best,” she admits in “Friends”; “I’m trying not to try so hard for you,” she sings in “Shoulders”; and in “Misread,” she asks, “Have I misread the way I feel about you?” Fazerdaze exhibits the same plain earnestness of artists such as Frankie Cosmos (for whom she has opened), who package the rich excavations of introversion in simple but impactful girlish pop. Fazerdaze is less twee than Frankie Cosmos, though, and some moments in Morningside even pack a punch. “Misread,” for example, backs biting lyrics with fuzzy power chords, and in “Friends,” a quiet verse with shaker and bass escalate into a near-shouting chorus over grinding guitar.

Not all of Morningside is tinged with self-doubt, sad reflection, and punches. There’s joyfulness in the instrumental swell at the end of “Last to Sleep,” the dreamy synth on “Jennifer,” and hints of ‘90s pop in the final song, “Bedroom Talks.” Murray makes pop, after all, and even in its most pensive moments, the album is bathed in sunniness. Though many of the songs are about the difficult parts of being a person in love (romantic or otherwise), they are love songs nonetheless, and underlying their various emotional journeys is the feeling that Fazerdaze lands on in the beginning of the album, that she’s a “lucky girl.” In these versions of love songs, we see the artist reaching beyond herself, way beyond the walls of her bedroom, into the hearts of a growing number of followers. We predict that it will continue to take her much further.

PREMIERE: P.H.F. / Roidz - Split

Kelly Kirwan

Auckland, New Zealand-based acts Roidz and P.H.F. (formerly Perfect Hair Forever) have had similar genre-origins. Both have roots in the lo-fi arena, carving out their own styles of bedroom pop that continually veered into fuzzy, fevered paces. P.H.F.’s punk-inclined creator, Joe Locke, would let his tracks pass through the process of reinterpretation—giving bands his melodies for them to flush out for a richer performance. At the same time, Roidz was transitioning from Daniel Smith’s solo-project to a four-man band, sharing stages with the likes of the eminently chill Mac DeMarco. It’s no wonder that these two outfits have now intersected, stitching together a split EP that celebrates their stylistic harmony. That is, Roidz reworked "Fearless Summer," a Joe Locke original, while P.H.F. took a crack at the single formerly known as Roidz's "Loneliness is Lame."

Roidz opens their cover with a bluesy strum and languid unrolling of lyrics. It periodically breaks into a thrash of harsher notes worthy of a mosh-pit underground, the vocals muted in the haze of head-banging riffs. It’s a high-amped interlude that feels like an homage to the song’s original form. Then there’s "Loneliness is Lame," which opens with an explosion of riffs and heavy drumming—the kind of clashing, about-to-burst interplay that’ll have sweat lining your brow and your teeth gritting from giddy intensity. P.H.F. ends it with a tenuous spin-out from the guitar, as if it were dropped on stage and the amp was holding onto its last stream of reverb. The new lens on these songs points only to the malleability of the two groups and their melodies. They’ve both got this fever pitch—an itch to deliver a track that'll spike your heart rate. Out via Danger Collective Records in the US, this is a crossover to tune into.

REVIEW: The Naenae Express

Laura Kerry

Legend has it that John Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus” after a student from his former high school sent a letter informing him that the boy’s teacher made the students dissect Beatles’ lyrics. Lennon then set about writing his most opaque lyrics yet, including tidbits from acid trips, a Lewis Carroll poem, and a police siren. One biography says he remarked to a friend while writing it, “Let the fuckers work that one out.”

Sometimes, though, a song about a sea creature is just a song about a sea creature. In the bright opener of The Naenae Express’s eponymous debut, the guitar-pop band sings about a sea anemone. In a line with infectious phrasing, they say, “Sea anemone you’re no enemy of mine / Taking your time just sitting on a rock / Or hitching a ride on a hermit crab.” Repeating “you don’t bother me” and “what a nice way to live,” it might sound like the underwater setting of a children’s book if the music didn’t so readily resemble the sunny daze of so-called slackers such as Mac DeMarco—too easily evoking an image of smoking weed outdoors on a summer day.

And then again, maybe “Sea Anemone” is more than a song about a sea creature. In the same sunny tone, the song’s second verse says, “Since the ‘80s the Americans have been picking you up and putting you in a box…not where you belong.” Could it be a New Zealand-based band’s take on American greed and neglect of the environment? A metaphor for the pressures of modern life? Who knows, but it does seem that we should be at least a little suspicious; on The Naenae Express, nothing is quite as it seems.

Throughout the EP, the band has a habit of building up a contained little world then tearing it down. On “Rain Delay/Save The Bees,” for example, they tell a simple story set over a basic guitar structure about a sports match that is postponed for the weather then begins when the rain clears. As soon as the match starts, however, the narrative shifts to a cat on a fence beside the field that is more interested in watching the bees. All of a sudden, the chorus changes from, “we’re in for some fun” to a fiery round of “save the bees.”

Maybe then, the second song, “Dream State,” is the key to understanding, a meta comment on the starry-eyed world of their music with its sea creatures and buzzing bees. “In a dream state,” they sing, “you just make up the laws as you go along.” And maybe when the music builds in a fuzzy swell and swallows the voice at the end, it’s the real world busting in. And, along those lines, when “Overlander” breaks into that catchy three-note riff from the song “Brazil,” perhaps it’s not just a fun musical quote, but instead a nod to the use of that song in the Terry Gilliam film of the same name, which deals in dystopias and the blur between reality and dreams, and so on and so on…

Then again, maybe The Naenae Express is just a collection of delightful and down-to-earth little stories told in sun-soaked, jangly psych-rock, created not to delve into the mind, but to tune it out. In the words of John Lennon, let the fuckers work that one out.