Photo: Harper Ghatt
The songs of Joe Ghatt love to meander. It’s one of their biggest assets, in fact listening to them feels weirdly refreshing in an era of attention-grabbing, streaming service honed conciseness. The Auckland-based musician draws on sixties pop, psychedelia, tropicalia, and a melange more of influences, channelling them eerily well. But they’re each housed in his amiable, slightly aim-less style, and more endearing for it.
As he says in ‘Orange October’, he’s “alright with just bop bopping along”.
In 2019 Joe Ghatt released Banana Sludge, the result of experimenting with a newly purchased tape machine, and some gear he was looking after for a band he’d been playing in. The ‘60s and ‘70s influences were apparent.
In an interview with The Self Portrait Gospel, he cited The Byrds and The Seeds as touchstones. He also mentions being exposed to Buena Vista Social Club and Gipsy Kings at a young age.
Recently Ghatt told Rolling Stone he was “listening to more Latin, Afro, Bossa Nova and Flamenco” while making this LP, Caper, saying “I was drawn to the nylon string more than ever, which I have a strong connection with, as it’s what I first began playing around with as a young teen, when my family moved to the south of Spain.”
That detail feels key. As specific as Ghatt gets with his nods to other countries, (or time periods), it feels bone-deep, not like an affectation.
Elements like the flutes that drift through ‘Always Remember’, feel perfectly natural. They’re provided by Andres Reboratti, who also plays sax on certain songs. There’s Jonty O’Connor with his usual fleet-fingered drumming, and a few percussion cameos, but otherwise everything is performed by Ghatt.
His surname proves appropriate, as guitar is his weapon of choice, with wiry lead lines popping up frequently, and with more personality than his deliberately withdrawn vocals.
Caper is out on Third Eye Stimuli, an appropriately named Australian label who point out that Banana Sludge “made waves around the globe”.
It’s obviously chill, inoffensive music, but the purity to Ghatt’s approach is impressive. With some artists you get a sense they’re trying to be a certain thing, here it’s like he’s barely trying at all.
And that's a positive. No doubt plenty of work went in, but Caper sounds like it just flowed out of him. And it’s most enjoyable when he clears space for the tracks to wander: saxophones going off script, drums doubling down on the fills, or Ghatt’s guitar getting exploratory.
This type of thing can happen naturally, when you have a band together in a room and people start to jam. It’s easy to forget that here it’s mostly one guy.
