RECOMMENDED RECORD: Minuit: The 88 (digital outlets)

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which now comes as a double album with four additional tracks added to the original album.

Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . .

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Even band member Paul Dodge admits the electronica trio are “supposed to be retired”.

“But the fact that we have some shows in the works has surprised us more than anyone,” he said last week.

It shouldn't really because the band's career – debut album The 88 in 2003, their fourth and final album Last Night You Saw This Band in 2012 – was impressive: awards won, songs on international television shows, musical growth, input from big name producers and the likes of classical composer Gareth Farr, recording and touring in Britain, concerts in Europe, a festival in Vietnam . . .

They called it a day in 2014 but this year came back to headline at the Go Live Festival in Christchurch and out front for three sold-out shows in Wellington, Auckland and Nelson.

As Dodge says, “It's a curious time for artists. Maybe it's nostalgia - I don't know - but the support from people has been astounding.”

It's more probably because they are fondly remembered and, in the description in Air New Zealand's current in-flight magazine they are a “veteran” band (which seems a well intended but rather cruel description).

In large measure it's also because they had a compelling pop quality and singer Ruth Carr possessed a kind of confident and studied, aloof sexuality in her delivery, as in Menace on that debut The 88.

That album went gold on release and almost broke the top 20 chart, and that was back when there was no separate chart for local albums so they were up against the likes of Norah Jones and Coldplay.

The album has been reissued digitally in an expanded edition with four more tracks and arrives as a double vinyl also.

In truth it was a collection of songs from four previous, independently released EPs alongside new material, but it held together exceptionally well.

And still does, even with additional material.

There's a hypnotic quality about Carr's delivery which relies on repetition running parallel to the sound of their drum machine beats and electronica (from Dodge and Ryan Beehre) which was influenced by, but not beholding to, the sound of Massive Attack and trip-hop.

But Minuit were harder.

Check the punchy Claire where all those elements come together with clever offbeat percussion.

Claire

 

But here too is the gently throbbing Aires with its feminist perspective and dub production and Jumble with an almost childlike delivery on a haunting widescreen piece.

There was breadth and diversity in what Minuit did. 

The additional tracks released with The 88 are Cautiousness, a stuttering breakbeat with speaker-shaking bottom end and Don't You Know a straight-ahead slice of confident pop given additional propulsion by the electronica backdrop.

And of the original album, Russell Baillie in the New Zealand Herald captured it in his review: “Much of the charm and character to the Nelson dance-pop trio's debut is down to singer Ruth Carr's own excitedly mangled diction.

"She can certainly find syllables and inflections that you hadn't suspected existed in certain words in her scattershot delivery among the 14 tracks, an impressive set which mixes melodic song-power with dancefloor vigour. 

“Add Carr's loopy word-game lyrics over spiky electronics and pneumatic breakbeats and The 88 turns out to be something infectious.”

Then and now.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.