Yule: Aaaarrrggh!!! (Scandal Street)

"Interesting" is a word which suspends judgement ("Do you like my new dress?" "Hmmm, it's interesting") but to say that this debut album by a young New Zealand singer-songwriter who seemed to have done his apprenticeship in flats in Grey Lynn and Dunedin is "interesting" means that it is of genuine interest.

He opens with a lo-fi complaint about having to eat his greens (very funny) but it's pretty much all up after that: he tinkers with low level drum machines, shifts neatly between alt.folk and a kind of bedroom techno, and gets in some very edgy guitar licks as well as being dub-conscious when it comes to production in places. He has a bit of cheap metal moment on attack! ATTACK!!

And Work Ethic fell of the back of the New Wave truck when Devo, Pere Ubu and the Buzzcocks weren't looking.  

In the promo paper that came with this half-hour album he says each of the songs is different to the others (true) but they are all fun, although some have a darker sense of fun than others. "I think it is because some of the songs are more grown up than the other songs."

There's also a sense of parody here - Digital Disco on cheap equipment - and the only one that doesn't work for me is the techno-rap section of Migraine . . . . and that's only because I've herad Flight of the Conchords' hilarious Pressure (which you should too).

Yule's General Dislike here got good mileage at Radio One in Dunedin and was included on their 2006 sampler. I'd think anything here would fit on student radio samplers - and more than a few deserve a much wider hearing.

Check out his My Space site (see link).

I like this guy's music, he's a bit all over the place but that makes it . . . interesting.