Graham Reid | | 2 min read
Two Wizards
Now this vinyl record has interesting history, but let's start with the bad news which the band republish to their own amusement.
When this album by the Wellington band was released on CDR and cassette in 2010 it was considered the “four-piece trying their hand at geeky chic to varying degrees of success,” by NZ Musician.
The reviewer went further (“not too sure that I'm buying it”) and suggested it was “tongue in cheek, like a collection of office in-jokes that you never really catch on to but have a laugh and smile at anyway, just to stick with the crowd”.
Okay, that's an opinion (an informed one we would note) but likening this lo-fi Flying Nun-like psychedelic pop to “a smash together of Neil Young, Dylan and Frank Black vocal styling”, as the writer did, seems way off the mark.
Whatever Terror of the Deep – the band around singer-songwriter and guitarist Oliver Dixon – were up to it was certainly a belated off-shoot of early Nun attitude with some serious songwriting (Wrote a Letter) amidst the chiming pop-rock.
It came with cover art done by Dixon which was also a Nun signature.
The band around Dixon were bassist Taipua Adams, drummer/singer and guitarist William Daymond and singer-guitarist Mason James.
And here is why we bring TotD up at this time.
Daymond (one of whose more recent identities The Winebox Inquiry we reviewed last year has overseen this vinyl reissue of this first of TotD's four albums which in 2016 expanded the eight song album by adding a chaotic live track Yeah to the remastered version where James' vocals sound like a wounded water buffalo.
This vinyl edition adds another live track Space Woman (with Tom Watson on keyboards). Both written by James.
To be fair to the NZ Musician writer, this album probably did seem out of step at the time of more professional sounding rock bands like Zed, emerging Pluto, the short-lived Breathe, stellar* and others.
But a couple of years later the release of the Southern Psychedelic compilation would perhaps provide a better and more apt touchstone.
TotD -- on this release anyway, they moved around between genres a lot -- were on that uncertain highwire between intellectual Nun-like rock (St John, Change is Never Far Away), garage-band folk-rock (New Age which sounds like a great bratty punk song struggling to get out) and that moody Southern psychedelia (the naggingly good Two Wizards and Sleep In). The live five minute-plus Space Woman at the end sounds beamed in from an especially shapeless night in 1974 and hints at a prog-rock direction.
All this is delivered in a NewZild accent.
Now we concede immediately the vocals here will be hard to take for most and that much of this might be an acquired taste.
But if the ragged end of local, lo-fi indie rock ever appealed then The Airport Underneath the Dome is worth checking out. It's not a lost classic or whatever. It just is.
I'm still struggling to hear Dylan, Young and Frank Black in it however. Anywhere.
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You can hear and buy the 2016 remastered version of this album at bandcamp here.
The vinyl version with two additional live tracks and insert material is available from selected stores
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