New Zealand’s Ruban Nielson and co return with a post-lockdown double album, a fifth LP keeping that distinctive dirty mic vocal filter, and a mixture of the upbeat and downbeat. It’s an oddly sprawling collection, variously recorded and written in Hilo in Hawaii, New Zealand and Palm Springs, playing on the idea of paradise, and escaping the idea of it, mixing the occasional beautiful and more improvised and throwaway, such as final track Drag, inspired a little by Lou Reed. It was originally going to titled Guilty Pleasures after one of the double-edged number (“Guilty pleasures are holding us together”), but that overall lockdown theme doesn’t quite cohere. On that note are throwbacks to 70s and 80s rock, nodding to bands such as Journey, but more attractively, Steely Dan. Among the standouts are the single That Life, as well as Layla, the chugging Meshuggah, I Killed Captain Cook, which is about the colonialist’s untimely end in Kealakekua Bay, and gentle acoustic opener, The Garden. An unwieldy at times but fascinating release, not nearly as coherent or consistent for example as 2015’s wonderfully still fresh album Multi-Love, but one that continues to extemporise on their unique, if fuzzy, sound. Out Jagjaguwar.
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