The latest sonic conversation from New Zealand's musically talkative gossip trio BRIAN CROOK, PETER STAPLETON and KIM PIETERS. Four extended new tracks (recorded in Purakaunui throughout 1999) that feature a more keyboard-driven and electronic sound than their previous efforts.
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I have plans in the next few days to put up a Wish list section. Please leave a commment with any kiwi albums you would like to see posted. Please DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT make requests for albums that have already been posted on this blog.
A great compilation of early live Clean material. Some of this stuff was included on the 2-CD Anthology release, but some of the best material on this release was left off of that compilation.
"Two Fat Sisters" & "Happy Birthday John" were recorded live at the Rumba Bar May 1982, "At The Bottom" & "Attack of The Teddybears" were recorded live at the Gladstone in July 1981 and "Caveman" & "Filling A Hole" were recorded at Star'n Garter March 1982.
A pretty rare release! Enjoy!
Thanks to Buck Dharma!
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After the next few posts I make, I am afraid that my supply of great kiwi rock is going to be running very low. I want to continue to run this site, but I can't do it alone.
I am asking... no... begging you guys to submit stuff from your collection to me. If it's from New Zealand and it's quality and it's not on this site then I want it! This includes albums from artists that are already on this site but not posted yet.
I want to thank those who have been contributing again. You guys have put just as much (if not more) work into this site than I have. Without your hard work this site could have never achieved the level of success that it has.
So please, I am looking for anything you guys can find, but I especially want material from the 80's from Flying Nun and XPressway.
Thanks again
Steve
kiwitapes@gmail.com
p.s. please use divshare (www.divshare.com) to upload!
The grimly beautiful A Dream of the Sea is the Renderers' most impressive outing to date, a dark and often harrowing plunge into a world of nightmares and noise. Although rooted in blues and country, the band's music frequently veers out of control, lacerated by peals of feedback and fuzz; images of madness and death abound throughout the lyrics, and the mood on highlights like "Low to the Ground" and "Right from Wrong" is positively funereal. Visceral and enthralling, it's a trip into hell well worth taking.
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Hello all! I wanted to announce that I am interested in putting together a Kiwi Rock covers album featuring reader submissions. Everything is fair game, the only criteria is that your cover be some artist that has been featured on the site. In the spirit of the DIY aesthetic of NZ, use whatever means you have to record your cover.
Deadline for submissions is July 31st, 2007.
If you are interested in participating, please either leave a comment or email me at kiwitapes@gmail.com
One-stop shopping, New Zealand style. Collection puts together the Great Unwashed's one album, Clean out of Our Minds, with the following Singles EP, a handy and merry collection of what might have been a diversion at the start but still has its own worth. Richard Langston's liner notes give a brief potted history of the group's origins following the first collapse of the Clean, as David and Hamish Kilgour got together for a slew of random recording sessions that became the album and what followed. The Clean out of Our Minds tracks are in ways bedroom recordings, but unlike what the stereotype of that term became in the '90s, the feeling here is affable and gently goofy melancholia rather than acid-fried weirdness. The easy-blue groove of "Thru the Trees" mixes well with the instrumental shamble of "Hello Is Ray There?" and the at once creepy and merry celebration of wasting time, "It's a Day." Besides, any song which has what sounds like autoharp -- take "Yesterday Was" as an example -- has to have something going for it. The Singles tracks featured the more immediate and live-performance-oriented version of the band, though there's still the easy-enough feel of the album about it, even with the steady chug of songs like "Duane Eddy" and the scrabbling "Can't Find Water." "Born in the Wrong Time," with a particularly lovely lead guitar melody and some of the Kilgours' best harmonies, is the real winner from that bunch, and makes a fine almost-concluding song for the whole disc.
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Here is a great collection of 7 inch singles released by CHris Heazlewood and his related projections, the collection contains the following releases:
Heazlewood - Badge or Medallion 7"
Heazlewood - Surf's Up In Malibu 7"
Heazlewood - They Slaughter Small Children 7"
Olla - Spetic Hagfish 7"
Sferic Experiments - Sci-Fi/Hi-Fi 7"
King Loser - Stairway To Heaven 7"
King Loser - Tie Us Down 7"
The cover art to each of the releases can be found in the zip file along with the music .
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Sorry for the delay. The requested re-ups with be put up over the next few days, along with some new posts.
Steve
The Renderers first release, released on Flying Nun in 1990. Very country and bluesish sounding. Interesting for their connections to The Terminals / Victor Dimisch Band.
The 3 7 inch releases from The Renderers: A touch of evil, million lights and bigger than texas.
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Good news for those of you who missed the boat before some of our albums were taken down! All of the albums that are filed under "Best of The Best" on the right hand side have now been restored. Hopefully our new provider Divshare will last a lot longer than Media Fire did.
If you are looking to have other past posts restored, let me know in the comments page. I will restore the first 5 requests that I get. After that, this blog will be all about moving forward with new posts.
Sometime before the end of next week a best of Kiwi Tapes collection will be posted, I promise that it will make the Flying Nun collection obsolete.
While Split Enz came first and hit bigger worldwide, one could argue that there would be no New Zealand rock scene as it is known today if it weren't for the Clean; the sainted Flying Nun label was formed to put out their debut single, their willingness to go the D.I.Y. route in recording their early material set the standard for any number of bands (Kiwi and otherwise), and their playful yet aggressive mixture of pop hooks, jagged guitar lines, neo-Velvets minimalism, and edgy wit paved the way for the Bats, the Chills, the Verlaines, the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, and a handful of other bands who helped New Zealand develop its own musical identity for the first time. Despite their importance and longevity, the Clean have never been especially well-served on record in the United States; their important early singles and EPs received little circulation in America, and their post-reunion albums have been only sporadically available, thanks to the collapse of several indie labels. Anthology isn't the perfect remedy to this situation, but it comes close; it's a superb overview of the Clean's career, with the classic Boodle Boodle Boodle and Great Sounds EPs included in their entirety on disc one (along with several crucial singles and outtakes), while disc two skims off the cream of the later albums Vehicle, Modern Rock, and Unknown Country (four outtakes from the Modern Rock sessions are thrown in for good measure). A thoroughly enjoyable introduction to an important and influential band, Anthology will also fill in plenty of gaps in the collections of American fans; anyone with more than a passing interest in the Clean will find plenty to revel in here.
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From a bedroom in a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, Birchville Cat Motel issues forth a steady stream of albums of alternately ghostly and aggressive drone-heavy noise rock. The alter ego of guitarist, songwriter, and producer Campbell Kneale, Birchville Cat Motel is akin to fellow D.I.Y. space rock luminaries like Alastair Galbraith, Roy Montgomery, and the Flying Saucer Attack.
Kneale played in a succession of minor and largely unrecorded indie bands in his native New Zealand from the mid-'80s through the mid-'90s, until a growing interest in the musical properties of feedback and drones -- partially inspired by the appearance of other New Zealand drone rockers like the Dead C, Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, Gate, Surface of the Earth, and Handful of Dust -- led him to ditch both the bands and pop music entirely. Taking his nonsensical group name from a sign he saw while driving through the small rural town of Birchville, New Zealand, Kneale settled in with his guitars and effects pedals and began recording. Originally, Birchville Cat Motel recordings came out exclusively on hand-dubbed cassettes (later CD-Rs) on Kneale's own Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label. A handful of vinyl singles and EPs began appearing in 1996, including oddities like the 8" square single "Tin Foil Teeth" and a similarly outsized split single with the California improv combo the rhBand. Birchville Cat Hotel's self-titled debut CD was finally released in 1997,
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Supplanting the earlier Kaleidoscope World as a singles overview of the band, from early days to cuts from Soft Bomb, Heavenly is a great starting point for any Chills newcomer. The opening three songs alone make this a winner -- the title track, a shimmering pop gem, "I Love My Leather Jacket," a poppy Velvet Underground/Krautrockin' salute to deceased drummer Martyn Bull, and "Doledrums," a perverse celebration of collecting unemployment and killing time with a neat clock-chime opening. From there on in its one great highlight after another, sprightliness and beauty tinged with melancholy and gloom in equal amounts, not to mention the quick, brisk surge that colored so many of their tracks ("Oncoming Day," "Never Never Go" and the charging "Look For the Good in Others," presented in a remixed form). "Pink Frost," probably the band's most famous number, is unsurprisingly featured, but that's merely the tip of the iceberg, especially when it comes to the earlier songs like "Kaleidoscope World" itself and "Rolling Moon." Concluding with later winners like "Part Past Part Fiction" and "Male Monster From the Id," Heavenly Pop Hits is, indeed, just that.
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