28 posts tagged “nz music”
Jakob is a New Zealand band, trucking along in the same vein as HDU, ambient noise stuff. This is a song from their first album, back in 2001, that I picked up randomly, not knowing anything about them beyond that I knew a guy who knew a guy that liked them, kind of thing (OK so the guy I knew was friends with the HDU bassist, so it's probably not surprising that he liked them). Anyway, I did post the song a while back, but I like the video too.
This is the exact song that made me start to love music.
Anyway, I haven't listened to this album for many years, so it's been a fun morning at work!
Anyway, here's Steriogram covering AC/DC.
We are off to Barbados in, oh, about 12 hours. That is, if the storm currently dumping all the water on New York lets up a bit to allow flights to actually be on time. It looks like it will, though.
Barbados is where we will hang out with friends of mine from graduate school, and drink much rum, and watch cricket at the cricket world cup. We will have a fantastic time.
So I will talk at you all in a week or so! Here's some music. It's more interesting than my ramblings, anyway.
We have:
Modest Mouse - Neverending Math Equation
Deborah Harry and Iggy Pop - Well, Did you Evah! (the Cole Porter song)
Pete Yorn (covering the Smiths) - Panic
Shihad - My Mind's Sedate
There's some variation for you! A bit of yelling, a bit of quiet stuff. Enjoy.
Dave Dobbyn, in Christchurch, 2001.
So this is another show that is on my list primarily for nostalgia reasons. I feel like I can say with confidence that any given New Zealander knows many of Dave Dobbyn's songs. He's been around, in bands (Th' Dudes, and DD Smash) and playing solo, since the late Seventies. His music is really singalong-y, the sort of music that noone hates, even if it's not their preferred type of music, which is the case for me.
Going to this show was a big deal, because it was with one of my very good friends, Dave, and it was not long before I left New Zealand to go live in the US. As we were there, singing along to all the songs, there was a huge wrench: how could I go somewhere where people just don't know this stuff? The songs that immediately stir up memories, recognition, inside you when you hear them? It's so weird to give away cultural touchstones, to exchange them for something new and different. It's scary.
Anyway, here are three songs. They go in chronological order. The first, Walking in Light, is from the era of Th' Dudes. Dobbyn formed this band when he was in high school, and this was one of their popular songs (along with Be MIne Tonight and the anthemic Bliss, an ode to getting shitfaced) and came out around 1980. The second is Whaling, a song that you might hear sung a lot in a sports bar or a rugby game, despite the fact that it's a slowish kind of song. Whaling was released by Dave Dobbyn's second band, DD Smash,
which formed after Th'Dudes broke up in the early 80s, and themselves
split around the mid-80s, I'm not sure when. The final one is Slice of Heaven, which features seminal NZ reggae group Herbs, and was the theme song for the animated film Footrot Flats: The Dog's Tail Tale, which was based on the extremely popular New Zealand comic strip by Murray Ball.
