THE PINK FROSTS — A SMILE AWAY

⌾ LISTEN TO A SMILE AWAY BY THE PINK FROSTS ⌾

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Gripping. Captivating. This gorgeous number will grab you, albeit gently, and whirl you around in a jolly dance, various aspects of your life whizzing in watercolour, leaving you in soft focus with a handful of flowers and a heaful of fondness. That is at least the general vibe emanating from 'A Smile Away', an affirmation of a song by Wellington-based New Zealanders, The Pink Frosts.

Optimism brims from the beginning, a propulsive and purposeful stride on the drums (Peter Molteno), the bass (Neale Willis) stepping carefully, softly upwards, the backdrop to a simple sun-glint of a guitar melody (Oliver Gaskell) and dreamy synth (Hedley Dew), married in musical harmony like a dawn chorus played out in post-punk. Things get distinctly more noisy with crashing cymbals and tumbling snares and swooshing guitar distortion, a welcome dynamic, joy bursting in sonic form.

It's on this alternating backdrop that Dew pours out his earnest baritone vocals, a kind of cross between Ian Curtis and Jack Steadman (Bombay Bicycle Club), conjuring tableaux so bundled with emotion yet honest and low-key they bring pre-tears heat to the eyes. I mean, "Wake up one morning with a smile on / You slept well and you don't feel worn / Breakfast of choice and the coffee's warm / The high couldn't be more lovely"? This song couldn't be more lovely.

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• 🔔 This wonderful piece of new music from The Pink Forsts is the first single taken from their upcoming Unremarkable Product EP. The self-released set trio of songs is scheduled to be available from 29th September.

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☟ The Pink Frosts Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 ANNA OF THE NORTH — SOMEONE

In a hypnotising swirl of '80s flavours, a wash of mind-cleansing synth that spreads like nocturnal mist or faux fog from a smoke machine at a retro disco, Norwegian-New Zealand duo Anna of the North spin an expansive track in the form of 'Someone', exuding a sense of hopefulness, a filmic reverie whose soft focus scenes of neon-pink-and-green-on-black flash in your mind, a balance of feel-good fun and melancholy romance swinging to the rhythm of the thumping electro drums. "It’s about how easy it is to break your promises when you’ve had a couple of drinks," the band explains in a press release.

"Going deeper," it continues, "the song is about accepting that you’re only human and to learn how to forgive yourself for your own mistakes and accepting that sometimes we need someone to save us from repeating any old habits." You can definitely, definitely feel the drama of that explanation imbued in the track, something highly emotive at work as Anna literally sings asking for someone to come and save her. The wide, vast synths of this track suggest a newness, a discovery, a revelation, the feeling of having been closed up now cast aside in light of new acceptance, something about the cold light of day blaring bright as the glistening sheen of synth sparkles atop the juddering electro bass, sobriety and honesty set sail in a vessel of retro pop.

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• 🔔 'Someone' is taken from Anna of the North's debut album Lovers, which is getting released on 8th September via, for some reason, three labels (Different Recordings / Honeymoon / +1 Records). You can pre-order it variously via this link.

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☟ Anna of the North Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 MICRONISM — ENGAGING CAUSELESS MERCY

The muffled roar of rumbling sub-bass, the pulsing vitality of it in organic waves—we could be inside a giant, swallowed up by a gargantuan something and dwelling there. The bio-industrial feeling of the track is evident. The whooshing breeze of sound like the inner workings of this huge being, the organo-mechanical movement of tendons and pneumatics. Acid synth twinkles elastically, delaying and echoing into the distance and creating an illustration of the remote and unfamiliar. The kicks arrive and thud with vigour, heartbeat of these futurist flavours, urgent and interior and solid.

But the alien nature of 'engaging causeless mercy' is remedied by New Zealand musicmaker micronism, balanced by rich chords lilting with horizontal lounge cool, a prescription of chill that quenches the fire flaming in the innards of the gooey magma golem. This new laid-back sound becomes scattered with rhythmic hi-hat shuffling rapidly, rollicking and twisting until the track's finale where the chords become hollower and longer and the beat and other noises fall away and we are left still vibrating still warm from the grand intensity of the track and its unrelenting living body, floating now in this slumbering stream of sound.

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• 🔔 This track first appeared on micronism's 1998 album, inside a quiet mind – "one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed electronic albums" – which was created entirely without computers and only outboard equipment. It has been recently rereleased by Wellington-based label Loop Recordings and can be purchased as a limited edition double LP or digitally on Bandcamp.
• 🔔 The album was originally released by Kog Transmissions, on a very limited CD-only run, where it was mastered by Chris Chetland. He is also behind this re-mastering. "Somehow or another," says Denver McCarthy (the brain behind micronism), "Chris managed to make it releasable 20 years ago, and now he has given new life to the album by a further smoothing of the edges, and polishing it to a level of shininess where it even sounds good in my ute."
• 🔔 fyi: "micronism (plural micronisms). A theoretical microorganism living in the ice or under the surface of Jupiter's ice moon Europa." (Wiktionary).

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☟ micronism Internet Presence ☟
soundcloud ⚘ bandcamp

☟ Loop Recordings Internet Presence ☟
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YEONGRAK – POPPUNK

Continuing the YES/NO love affair with lolicore/noise/and-other-things label Mecha Yuri, I'd like to introduce another proponent of the label, yeongrak. A musicmaker from New Zealand (I think), they've just recently released an album, little submucosal via the netlabel, a collection of mesmerising noise-infused morsels of music that vary from explosively overdriven to delicate and brain-cleansing, bristling with punchy experimentalism.

Because we love knowing shit, I googled "submucosal" – a biological term, turns out it refers to being situated in between the "mucosa" (a lining of the throat and intestines, to do with facilitating the production of mucus) and the tissue that connects the mucosa. Interesting. Gross. How can just reading about the body feel like a horror film? But in this lies the key element of rebellion-through-shock that is a widely held, stylistic and ideological tenet of the lolicore genre and all associated its associated offshoots.

Anyway, we've chosen the album's opener, 'poppunk', to showcase.

In its glistening digitalism, its chimes and soothing ambient electronic croons, is the fleeting beauty of life; our fragile nature at heart played out on childlike glockenspiel, a living-dream feel resounding in the soft tangle of synth at work in the ether throughout the track. A beat heralds reality: an almost confusing medley of stuttering hi-hats, heart-bursting kicks and abrasive velcro handclaps. It becomes noisier, more damaged, with the added distorted husk of a bass kick crunching its way onward, and razor sharp open hats adding their lethal metallic touch to the track; all in all, there is in 'poppunk' all the unexpected, offbeat fun of grime, but with a combined and equal penchant for delicacy and noise at the same time.

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• You can obtain the album little submucosal from Mecha Yuri's Bandcamp.
• yeongrak recently did a split album with goreshit, one of the originators of lolicore as a genre of a music, called safety cuts. Check it out.

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