OCF 06 – Smith vs Brown
Shearwater Records is pleased to announce the sixth in a series of weekly – more or less – releases in their virtual seven inch “OCF” series.
I don’t think I’d be exposing any prejudices unshared by anyone reading this if I said that (Radiant Records aside) I’d always assumed that the musical scene in Timaru would be a hotbed of Top Forty pap and Classic Rock.
Not so. There seems, in fact, to be quite the active nexus of radical music hard at work down there. Smith vs Brown, brothers Andrew and Paul Jones and an assortment of friends and family, are one of its leading lights, combining cerebral rigour with an impressively aggressive sound. They’re responsible for a handful of excellent lathe-cuts, cassettes and CD-r’s, including the genius ‘Breath of the Volcano’, and Andrew writes the zine ‘Pudgy Doll’, the main source of documentation of their small and vital scene.
These two tracks display the complementary sides of their musical personalities. ‘Another Time, Perhaps’ is a collage of clattering sound effects, sine bass, a queasily panning drum loop possibly quoting the middle section of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, and a primitivist guitar line that sounds as though the guitarist is imagining himself throttling a chook. Its companion, despite its flippant title, is a monolithic thumper that shows why Smith vs Brown have earned a reputation for bone-shakingly ferocious live performances. Distorted drums and lolloping bass provide a Krautrock schema across which is stretched a network of heavily effected post-rock squeals, scrapes and drones, sounding like nothing so much as a desperate robot trying to escape from a burning building. It’s great stuff – a Wagnerian counterpoint to the dross of everyday life.
Available for free from the DivShare link below. Size: 11.39 Mb.
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