Tony Stamp engages with Auckland musician Lunavela’s scathingly honest indie rock, joke-filled dance floor cuts from French/ Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, and Canadian JayWood’s breezy funk jams.
Imposter Syndrome by Lunavela
Lunavela (Steve Mathieson) Photo: supplied
It’s a familiar story: a New Zealand band achieves enough local success that they relocate to a bigger market and give it a good crack before burning out and returning home.
So it went for Auckland outfit Collapsing Cities in the late 2000s. During their time in London, The Guardian named them Band of the Week, and NME listed them as one of "the ten hopes for the future of music".
Collapsing Cities had a certain type of cool that was very of its time, combining indie rock with dance music’s rhythmic heft, and the acerbic lyrics of frontman Steve Mathieson.
Now, ten years after the second and final Collapsing Cities album, Mathieson has released his first solo effort, under the name Lunavela.
The album shows he still has a way with a chord progression and the kind of bracingly honest lyrics that had me hitting rewind to check I’d heard what I thought I had.
‘Six-Out-of-Ten Friend’ refers to those acquaintances a bit down the pecking order. Mathieson sings “Talking at me for a whole hour isn’t my idea of fun”, and makes a refrain of the line “avoiding you at the supermarket”. You probably get what he means.
This album is called Imposter Syndrome and given Mathieson's direct manner and the gap between albums, you can assume he's referring to himself. But these songs are just as accomplished as those of his old band.
It might be what he’s referring to on ‘A Phase’, brushing off concerns with “It’s just a phase I’m going through”, but musically it’s rousing and triumphant.
Mathieson’s wit is often self-deprecating and often hits when you least expect: the song “You Know Who You Are, You Know How I Feel” is touching and to the point, with some of the ache of a Britpop ballad. Then he casually refers to himself as “some washed-up dude who used to play in a band that you've never heard of”.
Lunavela was the name Mathieson and guitarist James Brennan made music under prior to forming Collapsing Cities. Brennan co-wrote and guests on the track ‘People That You Know’, which revives that idea of missed connection - the full line is “All the people that you know that you don’t really know”. It’s a stately and slightly eerie pop strummer.
Imposter Syndrome was mixed by Auckland engineer Ben Lawson - one of the best pairs of ears in the country - and Dave Eringa, a UK producer who’s worked with manic Street Preachers among others. Consequently, it sounds fantastic.
Part of Collapsing Cities' appeal was their image as up-for-it larrikins. There’s still some of that here - one line refers to “The darkness of the morning after”. But mostly this is an album about maturation, and about being honest with yourself.
On ‘Pandering Meandering’, Mathieson sings “I’ll tell you all my flaws instead of pretending my life is better than it is”. It could almost be a mission statement for this accomplished album.
Topical Dancer by Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul
Photo: Supplied
There’s been a spate recently of self-descriptive album titles, but I’m particularly taken with Topical Dancer from the French/ Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul.
Adigéry has Caribbean heritage, and there’s the temptation to misread the title as ‘Tropical’ Dancer, but ‘Topical’ is much more accurate: this is music made for the dancefloor, brimming with a mischievous type of fun, but the pair have opinions on a range of topics, and the album is focused on making them heard.
‘Blenda’ is the album’s most bracing example of Adigéry confronting bigotry with musical froth. She’s a Black French person and Pupul is Chinese-Belgian so “go back to the country where you belong” is something they’ve both heard in their lives.
Adigéry neuters the sentiment with her sing-song delivery, and with lines like “Siri can you tell me where I belong?" she points out the idiocy of reductive racism.
There’s something very Francophone about this cheeky attitude to serious issues, and the pair take it further on ‘Esperanto’, which spends half its runtime offering advice on racial and gender relations.
Invoking privilege and building walls as they do in the song marks this as very post-2016, and a bit self-satirising - but that could be the French accent and the clear smile in Adigéry’s voice… or maybe it’s a smirk.
The attitude is clear from the opening track, which is a compilation of her unscripted phone conversations with Pupul. Their two voices are processed to suddenly snap into harmony or speak in time with the number being dialled.
Adigéry and Pupul extend this idea of making candid audio into music on my favourite track here. Called ‘HAHA’, it features the sound of Adigéry's laughter, cleverly edited and pitch-shifted over a sluggish techno beat.
The lyric “guess you had to be there” is a telling one: a lot of Topical Dancer does feel like a series of private jokes between its makers, but if you want to join in you’re welcome to.
The album was co-written and produced by Belgian duo Soulwax, and their flavour of propulsive, squelching dance music seeps into every track. But it’s the outsized personalities and opinions of Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul that make it something more compelling.
Slingshot by JayWood
Photo: Supplied
There’s such an amiable, laissez-faire vibe hanging over the music of JayWood, it came as no surprise to me that he’s Canadian.
The new album Slingshot is his first for the American label Captured Tracks that's known for indie guitar-scrappers Mac De Marco, Wild Nothing and Diiv.
But JayWood has something different. Although his music-making began as “a bedroom recording project of sad jangle-pop songs”, it eventually broadened to include funk and psychedelia.
On his latest album Slingshot, JayWood reaches into the past to expand his sound even further.
‘Thank You’ is the most serious song here, addressed to someone departed who JayWood says he’ll see in the next life.
He presumably means his mother - she died in 2019 and he wrote this album as a distraction from mourning. That might be why the tracks tend to aim for uplifting, most notably the disco pop of ‘All Night Long’.
JayWood’s real name is Jeremy Haywood-Smith and he's a native of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
His mother’s passing was not long before lockdown hit Canada, and like a lot of musicians JayWood made the most of the extra time at home, crafting an album that examines past versions of himself and takes place over the course of one day.
On Slingshot, JayWood includes different characters and plot points. As he reflects on his Black heritage, genres like R&B creep into proceedings, such as on the track ‘Tulips’.
JayWood has cited Kendrick Lamar as an influence on this album, particularly the American hip-hop artist's sense of storytelling.
This perhaps inspired Slingshot’s single hip-hop track ‘Shine’ which addresses the 2020 murder of American man George Floyd in a '90s-style backpack rap.
JayWood says the title Slingshot refers to how the album was created - he looked to the past as a way to propel himself into the future.
Its mix of earnest subject matter with fun musicality isn’t unique but it is infectious - if you like funk basslines, falsetto and nostalgic grooves there’s a lot to enjoy here.
