Bailterspace: Bailterspace

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Herald rating: * * *

They might have remastered the tracks to this 18-song career-summary compilation from the former Nun dark lords of noise-rock ... hey, but you still can't hear the words. Oh well, it's still a worthwhile document of the band's six albums and multiple EPs, though it appears that the early New Zealand-recorded albums - 1988's Tanker and 1989's Thermos (still the best of the bunch) - are under-represented in favour of their mid-90s efforts recorded after the trio decamped to New York with occasional tours home.

Points off, too, for the frustratingly minimalist liner-notes containing nothing to mark the occasion. Still, it throbs along reminding of those years of Bailterspace shows where they sounded quite like nothing else, only louder and more lumbering.

And the songs early in the running, such as Splat, Colours (off 1995's Wammo), showed they weren't afraid of fitting a dreamy pop tune into all that metallic texture when the mood took them.

But the vocals rarely came up for air in the tidal wave created by the seismic shifts of Alister Parker's molten-ore guitar, John Halvorsen's bass and Brent McLachlan's hydraulic drums.

And after all these years, Bailterspace are a local pinnacle of rock austerity: the band who never came in from the cold.

(Flying Nun)