Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Gotta love 'em for the product description of this Auckland-based electronica trio of Billie Fee, Mike Sperring and Damian Golfinopoulos.
Their PR says it is “perfectly suited for a European Dungeon Rave” (their debut album Red Tower came with a perfume named Leathery Coward) and they have released “luxuriously bogan techno tracks [of] sewer pop”.
These enjoyably graphic, and perhaps even repellant, portrayals are subverted by an album of disgruntled but mostly approachable industrial techno where Fee's voice soars in like a helium-filled opera singer on the dramatic, six minute Spit It Out, a piece ideal for a World of Wearable Arts event.
There's atmospheric menace courtesy of the cut-up, disembodied voices and loops on Powder Room, the staccato soundscape of Doghead and the disconnected, declaimed phrases on Precipitate: “cremation station”, “local massacre” and “locust breeder” among them.
Sometimes the slurry of fulminating phrases is sound'n'fury suggesting more than it delivers (Doghead). And Piss Baby – which says no one remembers the 9th commandment (thou shalt not bear false witness) – is reduced to the mildly provocative “though shalt not piss/fuck in the street”.
While lacking the tensile strength of most punishing techno-rock and perhaps presenting as misanthropic post-punk industrialists, Grecco Romank aren't without humour: they hope their addictive dance-floor track Celestial Poison featuring Jeff Henderson's atonal baritone sax and weird yodel-vocals by Ron Gallipoli – will be “New Zealand's official entry into Eurovision 2023”.
Gotta love 'em for that.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.
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