Graham Reid | | 3 min read
Wading through their elevating credentials (cult status, obscure releases, musically and literally itinerant) and the arty buzzwords they have already attracted is one thing, but - is the album any good?
Yes - although that's not unequivocal. It's an adventure to listen to, tosses up surprises constantly and pays aces back for attention given. Excellent good fun, albeit in a much more familiar way than their champions might have it.
Wendyhouse are already acclaimed as avant-garde - yet in their pop sonics and bleep-buzz lo-fi electronics they owe great debts to the Residents, This Heat, Pere Ubu, Chris Knox and other lo-fi practitioners of pop.
This is the "all sound is created equal" ethic, so there are samples from movies and educational flexi-discs, sounds with answerphone fidelity, and there are spoken word overlays and noisebeds of static.
The result is eerie, quirky, funny - but also shot through with pop and a great lounge ballad at the midpoint.
Some tracks are from a postal-recording project where four people - in Hamilton, someone itinerant in the North Island, someone in London, one in transit around Britain, and so on - sent sounds to each other to embellish. Others like Bolger Out (a piece of insectoid pop) came from a cassette of a few years ago.
The band name suggests the childlike, but inside the Wendyhouse there can be a sardonic world view combined with a juvenile innocence celebrated sometimes on children's toy instruments.
Yet there is canny knowingness at work here: the emotionally overwrought 2nd Hand Alien could be old Space Waltz devolved into Casiotone lo-fi, and Pretty comes off as one of those stern Chris Bailey/Saints ballads but tosses in ridiculous backing vocals and a "god has strange eyes" chorus. Yep, it's that good.
So Much More is cheesy lounge disco which sounds like Ross Mullins/Last Man Down with tangled guitars and a spoken bit from television soap. Lyrically it has the ironic distance which has been a strong thread among New Zealand songwriters, though I doubt Wendyhouse has heard of Mullins.
And while there are odd soundscapes, Wendyhouse are as much about language as sonics. The adeptly ambiguous lyrics could be ironic, satiric, sardonic or downright stupid.
Occasionally there are limp tracks (the dreary ballad Shine On, the undergrad Scotland) and some of the interludes aren't that good (the childlike Mr Milk Droll which takes loops and sonics but does little more than become the Residents, A Disparate Search.) And sometimes it's absurdly adolescent: it would be easy to live without the slacker practice-room trash normal-programme-will-be-resumed of Tom Sauce, or Sauce.
But mostly you can't help smile: a love song in fear of Henry Rollins ("give Henry Rollins a hug") and the Rollins inside us all? Tetsno III is a long, loping, percussive, funky bash track and Libedo (sic) is a sleazy single-entendre slice of priapic pop.
And it all goes out on Scarabs, a long slow multitrack of voices and drones with a friendly little "bye-bye" in the final seconds.
Yes, acres of diverse listening here.
So Wendyhouse? Out of the underground and into the mainframe. Yet despite its cleverly referential originality, hailed as avant-garde?
Well, John Lennon (who knew a bit about pop music and found sounds) said "avant-garde is French for bullshit." And in pop/rock that has generally been true.
But Wendyhouse give it a good name, and if they are avant then the garde will be eerie, good-humoured, with plenty of disconcerting Dada sound collages and a healthy dose of pop for palatability.
Yes, the future is in good hands. And the present is well served also.
I've certainly sent my $15 off to the fan club.
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