Critic-at-Large Issue 11

Salient Celebrates New Zealand Music Month!

Vera Ellen: HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME

Happy New Zealand Music Month, bitches! While all you caffeine-addicted trackie-wearing zombies file in and out of your Maclaurin lecture theatres, ears stuffed full of musical garbage, just know that somewhere in the crowd I’ll be there with my dad’s vintage Workshop jeans and my Vera Ellen tunes. One decaf flat white, please!

Just kidding! I’ve relapsed on caffeine, of course. But I still do my best to listen local. Aotearoa’s music culture has a few key strains, historically speaking, one of which encircles the label Flying Nun Records, which became known in the early 80s for their jangly, lo-fi, post-punk band sound. Vera Ellen, since her sophomore album signed to the label, in some sense comes out of that tradition, adding to the stylistic blend her charm; her lightness of touch.

Ellen’s new record, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME, comes out of a period of writers’ block, apparently—but from the music you wouldn’t think that was the case at all. Her lyrics are sharp, with a tendency to tip over into playful exaggeration. “I was the dancer in the kitchen, you were the choir / I was the loner in the ballroom starting the fire,” runs a couplet from the brilliant “thaw”—the effect, though, is less surreal than candid, especially as its chorus straightens out these complexities and we get the message clear and good: “Goddamn me, I can’t think / You touch me, romance me.” Swooning between the straight-talking choruses and the rambling verses, evenly balanced in their length (choruses are usually shorter), the song offers a complete picture of infatuation for how its lyric thrives on intensity, a laserlike focus on feeling—and also for how, in all its love-drunkenness, it’ll suddenly manifest a real shudder of a line: “I think I just remembered life”!

If “thaw” is pure Ellen, you’ll have to forgive me for remarking that there’s something a little The Beths-y about “big shot jr.” It’s not just that Ellen sings in her Kiwi accent—it’s that guitar figure, rushing and dawdling around the pulse; it’s those corners the band turns when they drop the downbeat of a measure and come whopping in on the two; it’s how the chorus melody stretches up above the verses, then gives way to a harmonic detour in the post-chorus. What makes it unmistakably Ellen’s? For one, it’s that big empty bar after the first phrase in the chorus. “You’ve come a long way since high school”—she lets that linger, then follows up with just a wee “Yeah” a bit later. Yeah.

HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT TIME in fact oscillates between feeling off-the-cuff, silly, rambly, lo-fi, and feeling manifest and purposeful as an album. I find the vibe quite compelling for how it raises the campy and dampens the lofty, even when it lets Ellen get away with flourishes that on paper you’d raise an eyebrow at (“You give me gayfever” goes the chorus of, um, “gayfever”). Or even when it lets her sink into a stodgier adult-contemporary vibe, as on the Hemi Hemingway duet “when it’s over”: it’s performed gorgeously but plays things a little too straight. Ellen seems to have saved her best for last—the final two tracks display, for me, in their intelligence and grunge, the influence of Mitski. “Tell me less; you say it best / When you say nothing” goes a lovely internal rhyme on closer “getting told off by mum” as the music swells into an extended synth-backed coda. Every city needs its real songwriters, and she’s one of ours. 

Aldous Harding: Train On The Island

As one of our most successful and critically-acclaimed singer-songwriters, Aldous Harding needs no introduction. So let’s not give her one! It’s apparent to anyone with ears that she’s got one of the loveliest and stretchiest voices put to record in recent memory: she sounds mousy on parts of “Coats,” an affectation; but there’s real technique, too, as she gradually covers the vowels on the outro of “If Lady Does It” until the lyric sounds half-swallowed; then she’ll sing a song rather straight, as on the highlight “One Stop,” set in her lovely upper chest voice, a gently funky drum beat coming in over the track’s second half. The recording and playing on this album is particularly ace (it’s the smooth sounds of Seb Rochford drumming on that previously mentioned track; elsewhere John Parish plays beautifully in the tight studio band). Everything is gorgeously mixed and Harding’s gift for melody is still absolutely astonishingly intact, as it was on Designer back in 2019 but which got a little stifled, I thought, on 2022’s Warm Chris. Yes, the melodies are there—I’ll be singing “Big thick coats on the dogs of people just trying to help” for the next ten business days—but I’ve always found the quote-unquote “cryptic” aspects of her lyrics a little underwhelming (“Eating rocks and plants / I pray for the incel” is the latest Hardingism we’ve been gifted (“Worms”)). You don’t want an artist as meticulous and skilled as this to fade into background music, dinner party music, bookstore music, which is my fear for her unassuming, quietly-confident style that at times eschews wedding sound with semantics, largely the dominant feature of, you know, the song form itself. But even when her songs, musically speaking, aren’t quite special enough to survive the obliqueness of their lyrics, Harding retains her posture, her artful distance, her ear for polish, her epigrammatic turn of phrase. “I cut my hair, nobody loved it” (“Venus In The Zinnia”). It’s not chilly—it’s cool.