Phoebe Rings unpack their genial, exhilarating debut album

American label Car Park already had a few NZ acts on their roster - The Beths and Hans Puckett - and can now boast a third, providing a home for Phoebe Rings’ debut LP.

Crystal Choi, who sings in the band, says label boss Todd Hyman is a fan. “We’re an untapped resource that he’s mining”, says drummer Alex Freer, “but we’re very grateful”.

Related stories:

Phoebe Rings began as a solo project for Choi, but with Aseurai, they encouraged input from bandmates.

“I knew that these friends of mine were incredible songwriters”, they say, “and I also had this little scheme that if you have more contribution, you’ll feel more attached to the band, and that will make you stay in the band for longer.”

Each member wrote songs separately before bringing them to the others, with results including Freer’s ode to the Auckland rental market ‘Mandarin Tree’, bass player Benjamin Locke’s disco-tinged ‘Get Up’ (on which he sings lead), and the epic swell of ‘Goodnight’, written by guitarist Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent.

The fact that these sit together perfectly with Choi-penned tunes like the lush, wistful ‘Not a Necessity’ speaks to the cohesive vision shared by Phoebe Rings’ four members, who mention dream-pop and Japanese city pop as shared influences.

“The longer I’ve done this,” says Freer, “the more I think it’s important to embrace the things that might make you feel uncool. You have to just stay the course, and hope that you’ll find the group of people who are also uncool.

“We all just found these commonalities within the things that we all listened to.”

“City pop is a weird one”, says Choi, “because I think for some people it’s a genre that blew up on the internet, but coming from an Asian background it was just old pop songs from the ‘80s. Musicians that my mum or dad used to listen to.”

Much more than just a collection of influences, Aseurai sees Phoebe RIngs fully inhabit their own sound. It’s genial on its surface, and quietly exhilarating underneath.

Caroline Park-Tamati’s presence in NZ music looms so large, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that her latest album is the first in eight years. Despite emerging from sadness, it’s as poised and effortlessly cool as ever.

Le Vā is a tribute to Park-Tamati’s late mum, who died in 2020. The song ‘Zoom’ brought to mind a recent interview in The Spinoff, where she mentioned the funeral taking place over Zoom due to Covid protocols.

“All I know is what I feel, and what I feel it fills up the room”, she sings. On ‘Fuarosa’ the lyrics are even more direct: “Fuarosa, the name of my mother”.

She’s collaborated with now-husband Parks since her debut, and Le Vā feels like a natural extension of their work together, leaning into electronic textures and autotune on ‘Fuarosa’, and sitting in the disco-house workout ‘Fractions’ for a luxurious seven minutes.

The album is robust and bass-heavy, Park-Tamati telling Music 101 “We want people to be dancing constantly and just feeling the vibe.” There are exceptions, like the gliding, drum-free single ‘LightBulb’, but mostly the focus (outside her voice), is on big, bold rhythms.

The music on Le Vā is, as always, supremely composed, and also reassuring. The news that she’s pursuing a new career as a counselor was surprising, but it’s something I imagine she’d be very good at.

A few recent albums have played up their evocation of the 1990s; specifically, that glorious period of layered guitars and loud choruses that was omnipresent in the decade’s first half. But none of them hit the mark quite like the latest collection from Dunedin musician Reuben Scott (whether that’s his intention or not).

It’s the second album from his project Salt Water Criminals (prior to that he attracted buzz with the Wellington duo Nic and Reuben), full of instantly appealing tracks with reference points from Pavement to Weezer, and maybe a pinch of emo. But there’s much more going on here than some pleasantly scuffed production.

‘Boredoom’ lopes along amiably and infectiously, and ‘Mediocrity’ belies its title with a gently soaring guitar line, while ‘The Long Lost Friend is Me’ spins a whole yarn over its two minutes thirty. The details are fuzzy, but the intent is clear when Scott switches into a major key and sings “that’s good news, thought I had some worrying to do’.

I Believe in Dog hums with the energy of a live band (it’s actually Scott flying solo), but its main strength is the songwriting, which skips from those loud ‘90s choruses to country-tinged stomps to delicate indie rock with ease.