Graham Reid | | 2 min read
What You Mean to Me
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one by a three-piece from Wellington/Te Whanganui a Tara which comes in a gatefold sleeve with lyrics and extensive liner notes (including the names of scores of people who joined their PledgeMe fundraising effort) and on coloured vinyl.
Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . .
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Although some would have you believe otherwise – because it suits a kind of “outsider” status – there's not a huge chasm between indie.rock and mainstream rock in terms of structure and execution.
The content may differ (many opt for the role of tortured artist or adopt a cynical world view) but it's not that hard to draw a line between classic Flying Nun and mainstream rock on indie labels.
The recent acknowledgement of shoegaze and power pop has been welcome and the forthcoming 30th anniversary expanded edition of Frank Black's terrific Teenager of the Year should further prove how genres overlap.
Search for Yeti from Wellington describe themselves as “atmospheric indie rock” and as a descriptor that works, but there's also more going on with the nine tracks (and one 52 second snippet) on this debut album.
Fragment is driven by huge chords and contains a catchy chorus and steely pop guitars; the desperate End of Days (“apocalypse soon be coming”) is prog-rock conceptualism compressed into fewer than four minutes and a pop structure; What You Mean to Me hooks back to the Seventies for some excellent, danceable and taut power pop and the seven minute-plus Red is their major, considered and broody statement which takes its time to build.
But there's even more diversity here: The opener Alice arrives with guitar jangle and a thump of drums before settling into anxious, dark pop; Fear of Drowning fits that “atmospheric” descriptor with “I went down to the water in the dead of night” and Out to Dry is a lovely, understated piece about never quite knowing why the relationship goes wrong.
A Cold Wind is an up-close acoustic number with an atmospherics synth which parallel the title.
There are a lot of images of water and Nature here – they are from Wellington so . . . – and some crafted writing which, although cleaving to the you/me/we template, manages to sound universal. That's what metaphors drawing on Nature can do.
For a debut album this is an impressive piece of work, not just in execution but that it touches on so many related genres that it straddles them all comfortably.
Hard rock, indie rock, power pop, atmospheric . . .
And yet it all sounds like Search for Yeti.
This won't be the best album they'll do, but what is here is a sound stake in the ground and a bid for attention.
Not sure about the band name though, but maybe that's just me.
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You can hear and buy this album (digitally, CD and vinyl) at bandcamp here
Vince Waide from the band backgrounds their formation and the making of this album here.
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