PHOEBE RINGS – ASEURAI: REVIEW

PHOEBE RINGS

Aseurai (Carpark Records)

IF THIS RECORD WAS ANY lighter it wouldn’t just float away, it would disappear before your eyes like breath.

Aseurai is sung with weightlessness, played sometimes with barely a touch, and mostly brings the rhythm of a tapped pencil (its rubber end) on a leather pad. Its glissandos are brushed across the surface, its bass an exhalation, and when it gets funky – a relative term – it glides on ballet slippers, moves shoulders rather than hips, and feels positively bold when deploying a squeaky shoe of a keyboard riff.

Crystal Choi’s (now) four-piece is said to be playing dream pop, a claim which to me seems to be overplaying its hand – something the band never does – as this isn’t an immersive, mind-out-of-body, wild feats of imagination, bold colours experience. That would be too heavy a drag. No, this is daydreampop: hazy, sun playing on your eyelids, your consciousness engaged but at a distance.

Pitching up somewhere between the almost-ephemera end of 1960s French pop (the ones who made Francoise Hardy sound like Janis Joplin), the frictionless sophistication of Japan’s city pop (which took smooth ‘80s R&B and some Latin grooves and ironed out even the hint of creases), and the thought-made-flesh of Air, Phoebe Rings should annoy. Probably would annoy plenty. Certainly those who want something to grip on will crack the shits pretty early on. But it sure can charm its way past your sceptical mental door bitch.

On this debut longplayer there’s nothing quite as perky as Daisy or as hypnotic-pop as Chesire, from last year’s impressive self-titled mini-album, either of which could have replaced the too mild Not A Necessity. But Fading Star – aka the funkyish one – is both delicate and physical, managing to suggest a shy girl coming into her own the further she moves towards the sound, or the light.

On a smaller scale, Get Up, with Benjamin Locke on lead vocals (and you imagine his bass played high on the chest) has a sense of momentum accentuated rather than driven by drummer Alex Freer, trying to reinforce the messages Locke is sending to his psyche to shake free.

But more emblematic here is the flute-and-shimmer of Playground Song, guitarist Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent’s finger-picking introduction the most solid aspect beneath Choi’s breathiness, and the title track, which Choi sings in her mother’s tongue, Korean, where the wistfulness reflected in the glistening keyboards is given an uplift with pure late ‘70s synths and synthesised strings. And there’s Blue Butterfly, an all too brief mini-heartbreaker with its hints of soul and summer of love vocal groups, and the closing Goodnight, a twinkling bed of a song which is exactly as described on the tin.

In a halfway house between these – I hesitate to say extremes for anything involving these sun-dappled New Zealanders, so let’s say corners – of Phoebe Rings you’ll find Static (Choi and Locke double-voicing) in velvet and flares, Mandarin Tree (guitar and keyboards politely engaging with each other), in cheesecloth and sandals, and Drifting (a bit squelchy, a bit pingy) in light PJs. Aseurai is that kind of smart casual/summer wear musical wardrobe.

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