Graham Reid is an NZ journalist, author, broadcaster and arts educator. His website, Elsewhere, provides features and reports on music, film, travel and other cultural issues.
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Tom Cunliffe: A sound catalogue with reference points in Irish and Anglo-folk with a light touch of Dylan. Photo / Supplied
Spit out your gum
by Tom Cunliffe
Singer-songwriter and guitarist Cunliffe’s debut Howl & Whisper almost a decade ago was him searching for his metier, between rowdy pub songs, ye olde time folk and ballads.
The follow-up, Template for Love, (2018) was diverse but more refined and focused with assistance from Reb Fountain, Dave Khan and others.
By his third – 2022’s Secret Exhibition – he’d found his place in songs with intricate details and imagery, and, with the exception of a couple of missteps, was convincing.
This time, under a thoroughly unpromising title, he has recorded live in Roundhead with Khan on violin and bassist Cass Basil for nine thoughtful songs.
His proclivity for words and images head-butting their way through is apparent on the dismissive opener, The Diabolical Hippies of Manor House.
Thereafter his poetic style – acutely observational on Beside the Pool, achingly intimate on When Dad Was Young – is married to gentle folk (Nightingale) and the melodic, twisting Dylanesque Vesuvius comes with mournful violin.
The five-minute Swimmers at the Forty Foot recalls ambitious artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s like Donovan, Tim Buckley and Shawn Phillips, when folk singers and writers stretched towards jazz phrasing and literary depth.
Cunliffe has built a sound catalogue that has reference points in Irish and Anglo-folk with a light touch of Dylan, but is mostly his own distinctive voice.
A half-hour well spent if local folk is your tipple.
Spit Out Your Gum and Repetition are available digitally. Images / Supplied
Repetition
by Great Barrier
From the pulsating throb of the opener Systolic, this Germany-based trio confirm the mesmerising nature of Can-like repetition and the surging power of a minimalist approach. And elsewhere it’s the abrasive muscularity of a synthesiser on the pop-length Deep Concern.
There are strong local connections in Great Barrier beyond the name: drummer Constantin “Dino” Karlis, now living in Berlin, has played with Dimmer and is also in HDU who recently toured their scorched-earth sound; guitarist/bassist is Jason Kerr (My Deviant Daughter) from Dunedin and living in Bonn.
The third member is keyboard player Richard Hahnloser, whose lean piano playing on the nine-minute-plus Read Only brings a melodic elegance to a piece sitting on a drone-like undertow as unpredictable drum patterns create a dark and anxious current. The centre-piece of this five-track album is the trudging but oddly attractive Diastolic, featuring the late New Zealand guitarist and experimentalist Dean Roberts, of the post-punk noise trio Thela, but whose career was mostly overseas. He brings edgy scrapes and swathes of sound as counterpoint to Hahnloser’s piano on a piece that closes with atmospheric ambience and what might be insect or bird sounds.
Instrumental albums like Repetition can become sonic wallpaper, especially if they have repeated figures and rhythms as their platform. But like Vor-stellen’s 2023 Parallelograms, one of the best albums of that year, there’s subtlety and quiet shifts of emphasis when you pay close attention.
