Best Bets: The Hollow Husk of Feeling (digital outlets)

A couple of weeks ago Elsewhere noted – not for the first time – how conservative and complacent a wide swathe on local music was. It was as if, as we said, the songs were obliged to come with guys playing an acoustic guitar around a campfire on a beach at sunset.

(And bugger me, that very week a hugely popular local band delivered their new video which ended with almost exactly that!)

It seems that in a country plagued with serious social and political problems, most musicians wanted to avert their eyes. Maybe they'd heard to old saying, “when the times get tough, the songs get soft”?

Of course there have always been exceptions (some on social media were quick to identify them, like Avantdale Bowling Club) but these mostly aren't people who find themselves on the charts for any duration, and that was our point.

Look at the charts, feel the soft and warm textures.

Best Bets out of Ōtautahi Christchurch however serve up thrilling and incendiary power-pop and have something to say.

The flamethrower opener Heaven on this second album recalls “a childish mind thinking this was paradise” to an awakening that “some prosper sewing fruitless seeds in far off foreign soil, the first to turn their back on their own backyard. Foster homes raise spoiled children who forgot how to stay loyal when the promised land raised its hand”.

Sylvania Waters take a scalpel to those cynically and judgementally watching reality television, Hairshirt targets smug complacency and gestural politics which will be worthless when the reckoning arrives and the punky Pensacola is acutely aware of “when a job was a placeholder for dreams of being a rock 'n' roller”. But now there's “the rattle of the stroller's wheels and we know we're getting older. Still we're not quite as old as we feel”.

Best Bets have a shared ideology of affirmative action, social awareness and acerbic observations.

Sometimes they bump into nihilism (“Let’s all place our bets on who’s the first to light the fuse”) and pessimism: “everywhere you go is disaster, you feel your heart getting harder”.

This is power-pop and powerful pop that pogos right to the precipice.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.