Album Review: Popstrangers - Antipodes

There's been a wave of great angular guitar rock bands coming out of New Zealand in the past couple years – God Bows To Math, Transistors, Grass Cannons, Ipswich. Trio, Popstrangers have put themselves at the top of that list with debut record, Antipodes, an album that revels in the dissonant darkness, adept at offering something accessible before pulling the rug out from underneath.

This is first evident on Jane, where an organ and seemingly innocuous guitar riff subtly shifts in unease when the bass rumbles through. There's a minute of this musical interplay before everything explodes into white distorted noise, and Joel Flyger's disaffected vocals drift in. That sense of unease pervades much of Antipodes – the stretched, off-kilter chiming guitar and Flyger's hushed, slightly menacing voice in In Some Ways. Witches Hand starts in familiar guitar pop terrain before the guitars disappear, Flyger's voice becomes echoed and fragile, whilst a storm brews just on the horizon. What Else Could They Do and Roy Brown are the strongest tracks, offering barbed incessant hooks amidst the dissonance and melancholy that nevertheless creep up and overtake without warning. Cat's Eyes is an atmospheric possessive track that threatens to swallow you up whole, while Full Fat is a psychedelic pop number that feels infected by what's come before. Heaven is the only real time we see a shift in tone and as such stands at odds with the brooding atmosphere that Antipodes so carefully cultivates (yet it's a solid song in its own right).

The haunted Occasion ends off this exercise in coiled tension. Popstrangers are an incredibly intriguing band, and Antipodes perfectly exemplifies their skewed, dark take on the world.