Mix Ramones And Saints With Loud Squelchy Noise & You Get The Pinheads

A female musician once made the entirely fair point about the lumping together of women artists with the wise observation that “Neil Finn and Steven Tyler never get compared musically just because they both have dicks…”. Of course, you can update that with more contemporary artists of your choice, but it still holds. So, the first few reviews here are all of a certain gender, but musically diverse, and hopefully to be taken on their merits – rather than their features and fixtures.

Kate Bush remains unique. So much so she can disappear for years on end, to re-emerge with her reputation and her art utterly intact. If there’s a surprise in And Dream Of Sheep (Fish People/EMI), it’s in its intimate simplicity rather the sometimes baroque constructions she can conjure. A quiet tumble of piano and that still just remarkable voice muse on existence as the waves close over her. This is art. Art you can suffer for, as she apparently ended up with a case of hypothermia from bobbing around in a tank at Pinewood Studios for hours on end. Forty years on PJ, Regina, Florence and a million others should genuflect at her feet for the trails she blazed.

Even in their name, there’s a nice ambivalence and ambiguity to Broads. It suggests a slightly retro attitude of sassy dames and bee-sting lips, and that’s part of what they are, but certainly not all. The voices can be plaintive, over a shimmer of guitar – giving their quiet intertwining an almost Mazzy Star quality at times. But as the view inexorably widens, as it does in the visuals of Nod Off, Dream (Independent) things might be a little more dangerous. The view across the desert plains might be a scene from a David Lynch movie, with tail-lights disappearing off into the darkness, and you trying to spit the gag out from when you were locked in the boot. The balance of seductive beauty and seductive danger is often well-hidden deadpan black humour in some of their tunes. 

Women in a harder rock context often have an even harder fight to prove themselves. Fuck that. The Mis-Made can go in full revs. And do so with power and grace. Blood Money (Independent) is an example of what they call ‘dark pop’, which essentially means this band – with members from loved and missed combos such as Nitocris and Bitchslap – has crunch and volume, but doesn’t forget there’s got to be some melody to it as well. Doing most all of it themselves, band has already toured Europe under their own steam, as well as the unlocked achievement of supporting some of their heroes…er, heroines, in L7. And that was pretty much a perfect fit too. 

Which can lead us into teetering over into that alternative reality of metal, in some its many forms. German is such a language of romance (joke…), that Kreator’s guttural howl is ideally delivered with a Teutonic grate to it. Gods Of Violence (Nuclear Blast) is the ideal title for something so perfectly unreconstructed in its old-world attack. Yes, there are women present – but they’re the Amazon warriors of video games and the sides of 1980s panel vans, or the victims of a lesser Game Of Thrones episode. Objectifying and offensive? Absolutely. But still the dreams of some adolescent boys in black t-shirts hiding in their bedrooms, whose hands are often on their own broadswords.

But if you want to know true pain and offence, imagine for a moment you are Father John Misty – actually, that may be a little beyond mere mortals – as he has now known the true confused pain of having one of his tunes covered on the American edition of The Voice. Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings is hardly the usual stuff of the TV karaoke quests, so maybe just congratulate them on their bravery. Getting past that mixed blessing, the former Josh Tillman strips himself of many of his regular artifices to sit at the piano and resignedly observe the political convulsions his country and the world are putting themselves through in Holy Hell (Sub Pop). All these various traumas seem to shaken him back to his albeit idiosyncratic senses.

The line between Vancouver and Dunedin may not be entirely obvious, but The Courtneys are the first international signing for the venerated Flying Nun imprint. But from a bass intro that taps you on the shoulder to gain your attention before the guitars spiral in on Silver Velvet, you know this is the kind of slightly nervy, but neatly constructed, strangulated pop with just frayed enough edges to happily fit in the canon of the justly renowned New Zealand label.

There is often an aching weariness in the music of Lower Plenty. They don’t activate nearly often enough, probably due to their shared membership with bands such as Deaf Wish and sometimes similar suburban life puzzles of the estimable Dick Diver. Glory Rats (Bedroom Suck) is an oddly stumbling waltz as Jensen Tjhung offers sometimes obtuse and maybe deliberately obscured observations of what’s troubling him, inward and outward. You try and just let it wash by, but it’s so carefully ramshackle it makes you listen repeatedly, just in case you missed something. 

And sometimes you just need some loud squelchy noise to get you through the next couple of minutes. The Pinheads make old-school punk rock. And are not embarrassed of same, as they’ve obviously got all those correct Ramones and Saints on the Walkman (on cassette, naturally…) that allows Wild Fires (Farmer & The Owl/Inertia) to bemoan ‘love as a product’ – the product in question apparently being some generic form of cheezel. The seven-piece whines and clatters alongside, with a noise akin to the guy next door’s lawnmower - the one which he invariable wants to use once every eight months, and expecting it to start first time. Add some of The Cramps racket to all of above, and you’ll get some idea of what The Pinnies are about. Noisily.