Andrew McKenzie: The Edge of the World (Arch Hill)

 |   |  1 min read

Andrew McKenzie: The End of Summer
Andrew McKenzie: The Edge of the World (Arch Hill)

Andrew McKenzie is the singer-guitarist in the New Zealand band Grand Prix which has long delivered a very pointed kind of slightly snarling alt.country with a rock'n'roll heartbeat and a dark, unsettling edge.

For this album under his own name McKenzie (who plays almost everything from drums and bass to harmonica and sitar) mines some of that same rich vein, but also steps off into other possiblities.

He gets you in gently however with the rolling ballad Captain Cook which brings to mind Chris Bailey/The Saints in acoustic ballad mode (and again later in the lovely Soul Tsunami) as much as Dylan at his most rewarding in the early Seventies (something in the dragging of the vocals, the chiming electric guitar).

He then picks up the pace with the wry but bitter pop ("ba-ba-baba") of Happy Face before You're Wrong I'm Right which is an exciting, acerbic and taut psychedelic blues rocker with a sneer at "the new Puritans" and "holy pilgrims": "The world goes round the sun, you're wrong, maybe I'm right".

McKenzie keeps the edge of his world usefully blunt in that regard -- why pander to revisionists when you can nail them with a song this hard? -- and Internaut is an amalgam of Happy Face and You're Wrong ("Ba-ba-Baba" but with a twisting Oasis-like psychedelic grandeur).

Letter From Kabul is an urgent acoustic-driven country ballad about a love going into a personal warzone: it includes this great couplet "Well, we paid the wedding singer and we paid the wedding band, couldn't get them off the stand" then later about the marriage "like Muhammed and Jesus we ended up in a fight, both of us trying to what's right".

This is smart, engaging and often gripping stuff with reference points in country-rock Rolling Stones (Ginger Tom) and the dark Southern stuff of James McMurtry and Chris Whitley (The End of Summer) -- which are all excellent reference points.

This album was "recorded at home in Hawkes Bay" and I'm given to understand was perhaps the last album that the late Ian Morris mastered.

He must have taken great delight in its willingness to lean across the precipice.

 Like the sound of this? Then check out this.

Share It

Your Comments

Andrew Gladstone - Jan 31, 2011

Excellent review Graham. I thought I should also point out to your readers that while Andrew's album is not available in shops it is available for FREE via www.archhill.co.nz as a download.

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

Trentemoller: Obverse (In My Room/Southbound/digital outlets)

Trentemoller: Obverse (In My Room/Southbound/digital outlets)

Over time spent with the considerable catalogue of the Danish electronica experimenter Anders Trentemoller, you might conclude it is easier to like what he likes than what he does. By that we... > Read more

Darkstar: North (Hyperdub/Southbound)

Darkstar: North (Hyperdub/Southbound)

By happy coincidence I mistook this band's name for that of a prog outfit I was once curious about -- maybe if I had heard the words "dubstep electronia" (which is how they are sometimes... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . DON CUNNINGHAM'S SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE: Exotic and erotic lounge-jazz in a Playboy world

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . DON CUNNINGHAM'S SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE: Exotic and erotic lounge-jazz in a Playboy world

Some albums come with a great back-story. There have been books written about Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. The recording of a Britney Spears album might... > Read more

LLOYD COLE INTERVIEWED (2000): This changing man

LLOYD COLE INTERVIEWED (2000): This changing man

Lloyd Cole, the Derbyshire-born pop singer-songwriter who sprang to attention in the mid-80s for his introspective literate lyrics with his band the Commotions, quit Britain for New York in... > Read more