Pajama Club - Pajama Club

The first and most important thing to say about Pajama Club is that they are not Crowded House. Nor should they be seen as simply another vehicle in which Neil Finn might practice his songwriting mastery. Rather, they are a band in their own right, Finn being joined by Auckland songwriter Sean Donnelly, drummer Alana Skyring (ex-The Grates) and his better half Sharon Finn, whose contributions here, both on bass and vocally, combine to ground the project (as they undoubtedly have her husband’s career) while lending it a dark, sultry edge.

Opener ‘Tell Me What You Want’ sets the score in this regard, Sharon singing “tell me what you want / show me how to do it / tell me what you need / I can do anything” in a breathy mantra over an oh-so-smooth bassline. Indeed, Pajama Club is a surprisingly bass-heavy listen; the punchy power-pop chorus of ‘Daylight’ is reached via a verse punctuated with deep and menacing eruptions, with a sense of earthing also true of the simmering ‘Dead Leg’ or ‘TNT For Two’.

Finn has obviously gotten a kick out of experimenting with his friends – everything is coloured with sampled sounds and electronic ornament. That said, it is the stripped-back acoustic ‘Golden Child’ that forms the record’s emotional core, dealing with touching eloquence on the pains of letting one’s offspring go. The album highlight, it is also the odd one out, being more reminiscent of Ghost Of A Saber-Tooth Tiger’s Acoustic Sessions, Sean Lennon’s serially underrated project with Charlotte Muhl, than the night-life flavours of the rest.

Pajama Club provides an equally invigorating and oddball answer to the question of what to do when one’s excessively hirsute offspring flies the coop.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 425, August 22nd 2011

Fruit Bats - Tripper

The preoccupations that Eric D. Johnson chews over on Fruit Bats’ fifth record are summed up pretty much perfectly on Tripper’s cover: a small band of antelope stand on a sun-dappled prairie, a dirt track disappearing over a low hill below a big sky, cumulus roiling gigantic away towards the horizon. It’s so striking that Sub Pop have been thoughtful enough to blow it up times five on the accompanying fold-out poster-cum-lyric-sheet – normally these things aren’t worth commenting on, but if ever an image said ‘freedom’, this is it.

On 2009’s excellent The Ruminant Band, Johnson threw the emphasis of his one-time solo project onto the talents of Fruit Bats’ full band; with Tripper he’s wound it back a bit, biting off harder, richer, but lonelier fare. Unlike the invented mythology of fellow indie folksters Blitzen Trapper, or the meandering musings of Vetiver’s Andy Cabic (whose longtime producer Thom Monahan has done a stellar job here), Johnson spins rangy yarns of characters seeking a path into the wide blue yonder.

‘Tony The Tripper’ sets the score: life led on the fly and chance meetings with random sorts, over a simple propulsive riff and Johnson’s Robert Plant-ish cries. These ideas are also covered on ‘Heart Like An Orange’, or the organ-powered ditty ‘Dolly’, an equally organ-powered persona talking the title lass into hitting the road… The flip-side to giving free-rein to feet with a mind of their own – expulsion to the “fucked up world” – is charted in a surprisingly effective Bee Gees falsetto in ‘The Banishment Song’. But as he sings in late album highlight ‘Wild Honey’, “to own nobody / to owe nobody” is, for some, an end in itself.

For Johnson freedom comes at a price, but it’s one that is ultimately worth paying. Much like this excellent record.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 425, August 15th 2011

Devendra Banhart, Husky @ The Metro Theatre, Wednesday July 27

Considering that it's one of the most stable professional venues in the city, there's an eerie tendency at the Metro for the mechanics of the place to become tangled with unfriendly results.  Tonight's example was a doozy: make it compulsory to cloak bags AND charge punters three bucks for the privilege.  Although it's possible that the crossed wiring existed solely in the mind of one endearingly confused security guard, that would go against the working theory that the venue will soon be issuing oxygen masks (with attached meters) at the door, thus allowing them to charge by the lungful.

Not that they would have made too much tonight, a sparse constellation of starry-eyed lasses and beardy-faced lads arrived right on time, to sit cross-legged and stare wanly up at Brunswick-ites Husky. With a sound that seems to encapsulate perfectly the nostalgic rural folk in vogue thanks to the likes of Fleet Foxes (which allowed them to get away with a rather nice cover of America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’), it’s unsurprising that their warm vocal harmonies and solid, albeit workmanlike, songwriting was well received – though the Matt Bellamy-channelling keyboard solo that at one point spontaneously erupted seemed rather unnecessary.

Earlier fears of the venue being strewn with naught but tumbleweed courtesy of the competition over at OAF (Wild Beasts) proved unfounded by the time Devendra Banhart (Patron Saint of Jesus Beards, Journeys-To-Find-Oneself and Hacky Sack) took the stage. A group of acolytes as diverse as they were enthusiastic managed to generate the kind of coming-together-love-fest vibe not normally seen outside of American teen dramas. Looking considerably more clean-cut these days than indie mythology might have one believe, Banhart didn’t really hit his stride tonight until backing band The Grogs left him to it for a bit, his quavering solo croon setting hearts (and ovaries) trembling. Make no mistake: Banhart is the real deal, a consummate performer and patchouli-scented heart throb, whose at times patchy songwriting is more than compensated for by a live presence both inimitable and utterly magnetic.


A reduced version of this was published in The Brag, Iss. 424, August 8th 2011