CRITIC-AT-LARGE ISSUE 22: Foothold & Big Surprise

Debt Club: Foothold

Wellington band’s beautifully played debut album

The first thing to note on Debt Club’s debut album Foothold is the open, buoyant, intelligent musical arrangements—recorded and mixed, too, with considerable skill. This is a lovely record to listen to—like any record by The Beths, its first order is that loveliness—and it floats among its jangly, guitar-forward colour a prominent saxophone part. Playing their damn instruments is clearly not an issue for this band, a tight six-piece based here in Wellington, but the risk sometimes is that their polish undercuts the knottiness of their lyrics and the edginess of their stylistic forebearers, making them sound less like Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” (smuggling its critique beneath a sheen of stadium-ready melody) and more like what half of Americans mistakenly think that song’s about (uncomplicated pride). 

Loveliness sure is the musical affect, but the band’s called Debt Club for a reason, after all—and Foothold’s lyrics are actually spotted with mentions of down-and-out workers (“I Couldn’t Care”), addict fathers (“I Do Mine”), and grieving twenty-somethings (“How I Can Fix It All”). “Brand New Lovers” goes for (and achieves!) a lush, open-air sound, with its beautifully arching sax line over the pre-chorus and its anthemic hook. You’d be remiss, though, to neglect its cryptic lyrics, which first see their singer spurned a la Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” (“The words you once exhausted on me / Are dripping from the mouth / Of the brand new lovers in town”), and only redeemed by leaving for a new town, with its promise of starting over. “We’ve done this dance before,” he tells us—and for how much longer will this dance go on? Chasing new feelings, new highs... the song’s anticipation of future dissatisfaction chafes against its bubbly instrumental, and brings the band’s Midwest-emo influences to the fore. 

Trying to turn further and further toward life, despite the future and its uncertainties, is largely the position of Foothold and the nervy young adults that populate its world. Closer “Mandolin” finds acceptance in feeling like a “loser”, and throws caution to the wind for love: “So we’ll pick out our paths / And hope they cross / If they don’t, I won’t be mad”. (It also, by the way, has the record’s nicest spot of production work, as a cluster of instruments enter on the track’s latter half.) Still, one of the tough things about big feelings—and for Debt Club, there are plenty—is that everybody feels them, and there’s always the risk of coming off corny or just too general when you try to speak about them. Debt Club’s strange brilliance, then, is that, like young love itself, they make these moods and mood swings absolutely convincing—if only for the duration of a song.   

Hannah Everingham: Big Surprise

Meditative third album with a strong undercurrent of acceptance

The third Hannah Everingham album turns toward hope. The “big surprise” of the record’s title is that love occurs and recurs across the span of a life; that “I can be kind to myself” even as that self becomes dissolved in the larger fabric of social life, and you’re unsure at the end of a breakup whether it was somebody else or yourself that you “left behind” (“Oranges”). Musically, Everingham’s lightly psychedelic, lightly funky sound draws together its trio of players into a mesh, but its sparky mix, handled by Josh Logan, doesn’t dissolve them into it: they retain their individuality. Still, this is Aotearoa music, meaning in this instance island music, and the attitude of the album as a whole is a cool, breezy, devil-may-care one, as though such musical skillfulness really could just take over you too, on a Tuesday afternoon in the right kind of weather. “I thought I wrote the best line,” Everingham deadpans on the oddball beach jam “Judi Dench,” “Until I heard one much better.” Well, she doesn’t seem to mind either way, and the song proceeds on a kind of improvisatory rhyme scheme: “If it were a movie / You would be French / I would be Judi Dench.” This is music for searching, not finding, and the album’s finest tunes have an inviting air of spontaneity about them. 

Big Surprise’s artful pose retains a coolness reminiscent of Esperanza Spalding’s more spacey work on albums like Songwriter’s Apothecary and Twelve Little Spells—and Everingham’s organic, tossed-off, syllabic melodies, placed closely on their texts, have her voice function almost like another percussion instrument. In that latter respect, “Want You”’s hypnotic desiring and the title track’s lazily syncopated refrain play off against strict drum patterns to surprisingly catchy effect. And the drumming, contributed by bandmate Thomas Isbister, is consistently stunning across the record, punctuating instrumentals that might otherwise skew too laissez-faire.

As the album progresses, the sound perhaps begins to open up (as on the brilliant 7/8 groover “Aguafiestas” as it spills into the more extroverted “End the War”)—though it’s all over as dreamily as it began. “Not the same as it was / I’m not the same as I was” are the lyrics (“End the War”), but the album’s trajectory is meditative and circular rather than teleological, and the overall effect is more Monet than Manet. That’s not meant as a dig, it’s just to say that radical acceptance is both the lyrical and the structural feature here; that development of idea or motif is not Everingham’s priority. Nonetheless, what a beautifully accomplished sound this is—and if you can’t stay at the beach forever, you certainly can stay for a good while on this record’s golden afternoon.