August 12, 2015 by Simon Sweetman
Radio Nowhere by Michael Ross: # 3 A New Zealand Album: Jan Hellriegel’s Tremble
For listening...fat files are found here... https://janhellriegel.bandcamp.com/album/tremble
“It’s pretty good, for a New Zealand album.”
When I have nothing to do on the weekend I pop out to see a band. When I have something to do on the weekend, odds are I’m popping out to see a band. In recent years that’s been a fruitful endeavour. There are a lot of great New Zealand bands treading the boards, including a few really world class ones.
It wasn’t always so, however. At least, I didn’t think so.
As a teenager I was raised on British and American acts, and struggled to connect what they were doing with what I saw and heard from New Zealand bands. I was a fan of big, brash hard rock, and all the hype that came with it. Local bands couldn’t emulate that for me. In fact, for the most part they had sod all interest in emulating that for me. They didn’t tend to look how I thought bands were meant to look, they seldom seemed to play the sort of music I liked, and they were never in the magazines I read. They certainly didn’t provide the sense of excitement or the escapism I got from foreign acts. And when they tried? That was normally worse.
And so, more often than I care to remember, I applied that cruellest of qualifiers, “… for a New Zealand band”, when talking about local acts.
Read the rest of the article here... http://www.offthetracks.co.nz/radio-nowhere-by-michael-ross-3-a-new-zealand-album-jan-hellriegels-tremble/