Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted
by Dam Native
Those who couldn’t comprehend rap’s rapid rise needed only to understand this: the speak-sing idiom allowed the marginalised, disenfranchised, oppressed and angry a vehicle for saying so. This country’s first recorded rap, 1988′s E Tū by Upper Hutt Posse, meant the Māori renaissance now came with a contemporary soundtrack.
Dam Native’s 1997 Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted – given vinyl release for the first time – is a statement of intent: words of affirmation and critical thinking elevated and arriving with urgency. “A Māori attitude … practical, lyrical and original,” Dam Native’s Danny Haimona says on Behold My Kool Style.
Extremities speaks of learning the language and what being Māori means (“Aotearoa represent … America doesn’t give a damn about me”) and No Formal Training is a blistering critique of education as opposed to practical skills with, “I shake hands, I know my place, know what I have to do”.
The exceptional Travelling has what sounds like bells of doom underscoring the lyric of “this human-caused condition known as hell on earth”.
Zane Lowe’s production is masterful, Haimona’s lyrics cleverly self-referential to give the album an internal and self-contained coherence, and Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not be Televised was clearly in mind for Revolution, which takes aim at “suit-wearing Māori … in their comfort zone.”
The album reclaimed pejorative terms (“damn native”, “Hori”), delivered memorable songs (The Horified One with Teremoana Rapley, The Son with Che Fu) and by name-checking – Papatūānuku, Māui, Jonah Lomu, golfer Michael Campbell, land claims and more – it could come only from here. No one would say Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted is easy, but few would deny its importance.
Flow Critical Lucidity
by Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore albums used to get considerable attention, but since Sonic Youth’s break-up and the messy separation from wife and bandmate Kim Gordon in 2011, his star has been tarnished.
And his enormously productive solo career – collaborations and albums under his own name – is shapeless. There have been the expected firestorms of guitar noise (the 2013 free-form improvisations of “@” with John Zorn), but his first post-SY album was the quieter, Beck-produced Demolished Thoughts, with synths, violin and harpist Mary Lattimore.
Its follow-up was the straight-ahead rock of The Best Day (2014), and Screen Time (2021) was inventive guitar pieces that were almost ambient.
This time, he hits an interesting midpoint of his many styles with an album of quirky moments (New in Town), delightful dream-pop (Hypnogram) and minimalist guitar figures morphing into cinematic pop (Sans Limites, on which Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier provides brief atmospherics). Perhaps his new life in a leafy part of London has led to the hypnotic, psychedelic roll of Rewilding: “This terrain is changing … so I’m singing for animals”. Behind the typically odd album title is on Moore at his most approachable, the eight-minute closer The Diver like a glistening, languid take on Sonic Youth’s The Diamond Sea.
Five Dice, All Threes
by Bright Eyes
John Lennon’s 1970 God was his renunciation of previously held beliefs (Elvis, Kennedy, mantra), the litany ending with “I don’t believe in The Beatles”. It was his farewell to Beatle John, the 1960s, and being reborn. It was hard for many to take, but he was optimistic: “I just believe in me, Yoko and me.”
Conor Oberst’s Hate, on his new Bright Eyes album, is more misanthropic and pessimistic. His hates include Jesus, Hare Krishna, David Koresh and “the protest singer, staring at me in the mirror. There’s nothing left worth fighting for … don’t you know the bad guys always win”.
Despite the album’s negative intensity (El Capitan with “they found you in the morning, hanging from an extension cord”), there’s actually much to enjoy: the folk-rock swagger of Bells and Whistles (“and cheap thrills cost a lot”); withering observations like “the public schools tried to ban Mark Twain” on Bas Jan Ader about the Dutch performance artist lost at sea; Tiny Suicides with pedal steel, horns and the obliquely optimistic “am I gonna die? Or beat back all these tiny suicides?”
The voice of Cat Power brings sensitive beauty to All Threes, and Tin Soldier Boy imports a series of LA images of dying palms, cops, Sinatra and “another shitty Scorsese movie”.
Oddly enough, Bright Eyes make existential doubt, bitterness, death (The Time I Have Left) and self-loathing (the shouty Dublin pub-folk of Rainbow Overpass) sound poetic and sometimes even cynical fun: “Because the trains still run on time.”
Dam Native is available on vinyl; Thurston Moore is available digitally, on CD and vinyl; Bright Eyes is available in all formats.
