The Sampler: Chaii, Parquet Courts, Alec Bathgate

Tony Stamp mulls over the second EP by Iranian-NZ rapper Chaii, a dance-influenced outing from NYC rockers Parquet Courts, and Alec Bathgate's 1996 solo debut.

Pineapple Pizza by Chaii

Iranian-New Zealand rapper and producer Chaii hit a new level of success last year when her song 'Nobody Know' was included in the Charlize Theron movie The Old Guard. Chaii’s career has been so healthy, and she’s become such a fixture in the NZ music landscape, I was surprised to note her first EP only came out last year. She’s just released her second, and on trend for 2021 but somewhat contrary to her past work, it’s bright and breezy; light but not lightweight.

We should address the name of the EP (and opening track), which had me googling to see if I’d missed something, but results were the usual controversy about fruit and ham.

I did start to see a pattern in all the memes though, and as Chaii starts the song with with "You’re my pineapple pizza", and goes on to complain about a wayward partner - I think she’s saying ‘You’re an acquired taste that’s not for me’. 

It’s definitely not a reference to her fiancé Frank Keys, co-founder of instrumental outfit Yoko Zuna, who plays in Chaii’s band and co-produced this EP. 

I was surprised to see James Milne’s name in the songwriting credits. He’s better known as Lawrence Arabia. Who knows who contributed what, but I particularly enjoy the way the chords creep forward in the track's touching chorus.

‘Might Just’ meanwhile features writing credits from Kings and Rory Noble, and it’s exactly the party anthem you might expect.

I have to admire a track that starts by dissing the pandemic. Chaii also shouts out te reo Māori, and says “Eyes bloodshot like the cheeks on a Pikachu”, but I think my favourite line is when she simply says “eat an ice block”.

She told the NZ Herald "The whole EP is quite playful and fun and light, they're very in-the-moment tracks.”

Again, I think that’s a very 2021 approach, where we’re seeing a lot of creators having fun and letting off steam. And it leads here to a song like ‘Get It Done’, with its wilfully silly bars about going snorkelling.

If art is about doing something no one else has done, then “Look at that fish over there/ Looking so dam lit” is definitely art. I also like the line “You feel important, I feel imported".

Chaii has a background in sound engineering and production, and co-produced this EP with Frank Keys. Their attention to sonic detail is all over it, that track alone is a feast of weird little percussion sounds. The key to it though is a mysterious, rapidly strummed string instrument I can't identify, but I suspect is a sample of something Persian.

She’s talked about growing up with Persian music, then moving here and embracing hip hop, and using her production skills to fuse the two.

The song ‘Mano Tou’ features Iranian musician Chvrsi, the two of them rapping and singing exclusively in Farsi, including the EPs most beguiling chorus.

Chaii’s early single ‘Digebasse’ was about her exhaustion at depictions of people from the Middle East, a complex track with sad subtext. Whether or not she returns to subject matter like that obviously isn’t for me to say, but I did enjoy how relaxed and off-the-cuff this EP feels.

The most upbeat song flips a bit of kiwi slang - it’s called ‘Oh Nah Yeah’ - and brings in American producer Party Favor, to deliver something high energy,  and most importantly, fun.

Sympathy for Life by Parquet Courts

Guitar bands have been incorporating technology like drum machines since those things were invented, but it seems like every few months there’s a press release from an act who thinks they invented the concept. Maybe the most notable example is Radiohead’s Kid A, but they also deconstructed their sound in a lot of other ways at the same time. And that album came out twenty years ago. And even then it was nothing new.

Which brings me to Parquet Courts, the NYC rock band who are the latest to have a member attend a dance party and emerge reborn, with a plan to fuse their sound with that of the dance floor. That’s resulted in the new album Sympathy for Life, on which the results are decidedly mixed.

Parquet Courts are led by two lead singer slash guitarists, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, both of whom became interested in dance music over the last few years. You could hear the influence starting to emerge on their last album Wide Awake, produced by the hip hop-leaning Danger Mouse. Sympathy For Life is their seventh, and on it they said they wanted to create the sound of “a club or party with DJs, not necessarily a live band”. They were influenced by Primal Scream's Screamadelica, basically the gold standard of mixing rock and dance music, and by that metric, I think they failed.

BUT I like this album a lot. They’re great songwriters, and while this sounds very much like a live band the whole time, there are moments they come close to evoking the club, like the tropical groove of ‘Plant Life’. 

Speaking on wanting to evolve the band’s sound, Austin Brown said “there's lots of bands that can write a Parquet Courts song, and I’ve heard some that were not written by us”.

I admit I bristled at that self-importance, and it reminded me of something: Stephen Malkmus, frontman for the band Pavement, was interviewed by the NME in 2014, and told a story about going to a restaurant that was playing Parquet Courts, and thinking he was hearing his own band. He was not the first or the last to note the similarity.

So I thought about throwing stones and glass houses when I read Brown's quote, and when I heard the song ‘Marathon of Anger’, which borrows from Talking Heads’ ‘Slippery People’ very explicitly - musically and thematically - so much so I was surprised David Byrne and co. don’t receive a songwriting credit.

There’s certainly a dubby vibe creeping around the edges of that one. During the sessions for the album Brown would sometimes put down his guitar and man what the band calls a ‘dub station’, applying delay, pitch shifting or distortion to various instruments. The songs were apparently created as jam sessions, lasting up to forty minutes, that were edited down later. The band recorded these with a series of producers, but only used results from two of them - Rodaidh McDonald who’s worked with artists like The xx and Adele, and John Parish, who’s helmed records for PJ Harvey and Aldous Harding.

There are plenty of straight up rock songs here, alongside ones like ‘Application/Apparatus’ that betrays its improvised origins, leaning into a drum-machine assisted krautrock rhythm. 

In the early 2000s bands like The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem got a lot of press for blending dance music with guitars, and to my mind they were much more successful than Parquet Courts are on Sympathy For Life. Those bands were drawing on acts like The Wire and The Fall, whereas Courts still have plenty of Rolling Stones in their DNA.

Again, I think these songs are good, and I respect Austin Brown for saying he wants to bring dance music’s communal vibe to indie rock. But for me, and I suspect the many acts who’ve tried a similar trick over the years, it feels quite late to the party.

Gold Lamé by Alec Bathgate

The Chris Knox album Songs of You and Me was a seminal one for me. It led me to discover The Enemy and Toy Love, and of course Tall Dwarves - the duo Knox formed with his bandmate from those earlier acts, Alec Bathgate.

I saw Flying Nun were reissuing Bathgate’s first three solo albums - the most recent of which is from 2020 - so I thought I’d revisit the first, 1996’s Gold Lamé I was reminded how sympatico he and Knox were, right down to their singing style.

Sure, Knox had the stronger singing voice. But Bathgate gets the same mix of angst and fun out of his more limited range, and you can hear the lineage of classic pop rock that Knox drew on in his solo recordings.

On songs like ‘Happy Head’ Bathgate employs a familiar bashed acoustic downstrum, which still feels like quite a punk approach to the instrument.

I instinctively love the sound of these recordings, presumably all analogue, presumably done at home. Lo-fi tape recording has this effect of baking everything together, guitars and percussion and voice all merging.

Tall Dwarves used things like oven trays and wine glasses to provide a rhythm, making them into tape loops, and they also employed drum presets from cheap keyboards, which also get an airing here.

The most 'Tall Dwarves'-sounding song on Gold Lamé might be ‘Pet Hates’, with urgent distorted guitar, an organ providing some blue notes, and another plaintive vocal from Bathgate about accepting your loved one’s faults.

On 2004’s The Indifferent Velvet Void the fidelity is slightly clearer, but musically it’s a similar grab bag of noisy lo-fi pop tunes, and equally recommended, as is last year’s Phantom Dots, a collection of instrumentals that maybe signals things to come from Alec Bathgate.

The reissue of these three albums mainly served as a reminder of the reservoirs of great music produced in this country that deserve to be rediscovered.