Tony Stamp reviews yearning indie rock from Ōtautahi, an anthemic UK dance debut, and boundary-busting bedroom pop.
The Common Thread by No Broadcast
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In 2023 we’re so immersed in high calibre local music that it can feel hard to keep up. Case in point, an Ōtautahi band who’ve been playing since 2007 have released a fourth album of thoroughly-considered, lushly-recorded indie rock, and it - at least in my periphery - feels like it flew under the radar.
On The Common Thread, No Broadcast happily align themselves with a certain solemn corner of bands asking big questions, at their best when they lean into wall-of-sound arrangements, and not shying away from the logical endpoint of their ambition.
Beginning life as a three piece, these days No Broadcast is more of a collective surrounding singer Josh Braden, who wrote every song here and mixed the album. It was recorded at home, which makes me wonder what sort of space he lives in - this record is expansive in the extreme, and was made around the same time as their last, Lie in Orbit, a much noisier outing full of pounding drums and squalling guitar. I assume a lot of sound proofing was included in the budget.
By contrast The Common Thread is subdued, with an emphasis on more traditional songwriting. But these reverbed soundscapes always look outward, even when the songs are modest.
On tracks like ‘The Shore’, it’s impossible to ignore how much Braden sounds like a young Thom Yorke, and to the band’s credit, Radiohead are named as an influence in every press release. This is the album where they really lean into it, although it’s worth mentioning the other acts they cite, like locals The Veils and Jakob, and Scottish legends Mogwai.
Those rowdier post-rock bands haunt the margins of The Common Thread, particularly when No Broadcast start to inflate the song lengths and indulge a certain grandiosity. On ‘All and Now’, an unidentified screech periodically interrupts an otherwise polite ballad, until it gives way to a swirling cacophony of layered tones and howls.
It’s a deliberately patient album, but effort is made to differentiate each track, and not stagnate. ‘Terrified’ is a relatively peppy palette cleanser, floating over a jaunty bassline.
Josh Braden appears to be a guy who takes things seriously, and No Broadcast have presented two facets of that on Lie in Orbit and now The Common Thread. The former was bruised and battering, while this album takes a more internal approach, dialling up the melody in the process.
It’s easy to imagine the title refers to finding mutual touchstones in a time of division, and the music is subsequently placating. It’s a hefty thematic bundle, and while a lot of local music comes with an undergirding of irony (and is better for it), it is nice to hear someone taking things this seriously.
Good Lies by Overmono
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Many years ago I attended a presentation by Serato, the NZ music software company, as they launched a revolutionary new plugin. It was called Pitch 'n Time, and allowed the user to speed up or slow down a track without adjusting its pitch.
This product was the first of its kind, and it’s not hyperbole to say it changed music production around the world. Cut to present day, and this type of audio manipulation is par for the course (as are many more), and dance music - the euphoric kind made for heaving festivals or stadiums - has whole swathes filled with disembodied vocal cuts that have been stretched, squeezed and tweaked in multiple ways.
The Welsh duo Overmono have emerged as maestros in this particular corner, and their debut full length is dedicated to showcasing voice-heavy loops.
Brothers Tom and Ed Russell have been making music seperately for a decade now, following a path that started when Ed, aged eight, would listen to Tom, aged eighteen, mixing records. The older sibling got into techno, and the younger made breaks, then seven years ago they decided to combine forces, resulting in a boost in profile for both.
Their music is the kind that draws heavily on pop: quite literally, incorporating vocal samples from it throughout. On the title track ‘Good Lies’ they come courtesy of Norwegian duo Smerz, as their track ‘No Harm’ is picked apart and built into something else. If you’re sceptical about this mode of making music, I encourage you to look up the original, and marvel at how different the voice parts feel here.
On ‘Feelings Plain’, which starts the album, the vocal comes courtesy of Algerian-born singer Miraa May, on a track that steadily builds steam and sets the album’s blueprint: a celebration of repetition.
In the liner notes it’s specified that tracks were built around four-bar loops, and I think that’s there to clue in the listener - there’s a real art to this kind of thing, creating melodic rhythm without getting annoying, and doing it within a tight time limit can cut both ways.
The brothers are often compared to legendary UK producer Burial, although to me they seem less interested in texture, and more in keeping the party going, but on certain tracks, like ‘Is U’, there’s no denying a certain icy common ground.
These tracks also honour their singers while recontextualising them, and the album breezily skips through multiple rave touchstones, including nods to mumble rap and acid house, and on ‘Cold Blooded’, synth-heavy RnB.
Good Lies is an album that feels custom built for festival success, and builds toward the track ‘So U Know’, which propelled Overmono into the limelight when it became a post-lockdown anthem in Europe.
The record wants to make you move, but more than that, the brothers understand that dance music can juggle melancholy and euphoria better than maybe any other genre - including the one they draw on most strongly. The songs may cycle through in four bar increments, but this is pop music through and through.
Aperture by Hannah Jadagu
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Artists from the record label Sub Pop frequently appear on this programme, and, however many years after Nirvana and grunge helped them cement themselves, they’ve done an admirable job at diversifying and signing exciting young artists.
Case in point, an album came out recently from an artist who recorded her first EP on an iPhone, and whose debut full length is about the process of entering her twenties. Hannah Jadagu is exemplary of a certain type of Gen Z talent: musically hyper-literate, drawing on influences from all over the spectrum, and bending them to her will.
Jadagu was born in Houston Texas, to Zimbabwean parents who’d immigrated in the nineties. It was music that connected them with Black and Hispanic families in the area, so Hannah grew up listening to artists like Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj, before her older sister introduced her to indie music.
In a recent NME profile, she runs through a series of influences, and notes how she found them - dance titans like Calvin Harris and Skrillex were discovered on Spotify aged fifteen, and she identifies Haim and Vampire Weekend as synonymous with the Tumblr culture of the last 2010s.
It was Steve Lacy who inspired her to record on her phone, and the result was her debut EP What Is Going On, a bedroom pop outing with impressive fidelity, all things considered. This follow-up, Aperture, has a little more studio muscle behind it, which means Jadagu is able to synthesise all those genres she grew up with into music that channels them all.
‘What You Did’ outlines a fairly standard grievance: someone has done Jadagu wrong, and she concludes “I don’t wanna talk to you again”. It’s plainspoken, but other lyrics are admirably cloaked, and the guitars are appropriately noisy, while on other tracks, like ‘Admit It’, she hews closer to dream pop, wistfully theorising about an estranged partner.
A standout is ‘Warning Sign’, easily mistaken for a UK soul cut. It’s one of the few songs here to feature a co writer - Hannah’s older sister Tymie - and, while it feels condescending to keep mentioning Jadagu’s youth, it is notable how mature her approach is.
At 20 years old, she's made a record that, in true Gen Z style, filters many genres through her distinct lens. A fondness for draping her voice in reverb may imply shyness, but otherwise it’s a thoroughly confident outing, made by someone who’s currently juggling their first year at college with promoting their first album.
She gave a quote about its title, which appropriately relates to her age - more specifically the amount of digital noise there is in today’s climate. She said Aperture relates to photography, and the balance of exposure with lighting conditions, going on to say, "as a young person today, you have to know how to choose what to carry with you from your experiences and what to leave behind, what to close the light on."
