Music: Colours of Autumn

With the change in weather comes a need to hit pause on the relentlessly upbeat summer jams, and settle into slower paced, more introspective sounds.

Melody Thomas profiles five Wellington bands with brand new music to help ease the transition.

Groeni

Local electronic trio Groeni (pronounced groan-ee) have just released their debut full-length album, Nihx, expanding on and refining their blend of atmospheric electronica, melancholic vocals and introspective songwriting.

Their music is beautiful, and so too is the relationship between band members Al Green, James Paul and Mike Isaacs – selfdescribed as ‘the three least blokey blokes in New Zealand.’ There’s a photo online of them cuddled up together that feels like an accurate snapshot of their personal and creative affinity. ‘It must be a social, macho thing that stops you sharing on an emotional level,’ says Al. ‘Once you get rid of that it opens up super rewarding friendships.’ It also opens up creative pathways, and audiences both here and abroad are responding to the openness and vulnerability that permeates Groeni’s music (they’re also very funny, but that’s another story).

On Nihx as a soundtrack to autumn: One of the themes of the album is dark vs light. Autumn being a transition season seems to fit nicely.

girlboss

Seven years ago, musician Lucy Botting moved to Wellington from Christchurch with her boyfriend and Wet Wings bandmate Darian Woods. A week after they moved the earthquake struck, taking out the venues that had cultivated the local music scene and causing their ‘cosy community’ of fellow musicians to disperse around the world.

Though the couple (and their band) split a few years later, both stayed in Wellington, and Botting started to write and record solo as girlboss. She eventually grew frustrated as material accumulated but never really ‘turned into anything’.

Botting started a band, rekindling the musical friendship she had once shared with Woods and bringing Douglas Kelly and Olivia Campion (Yumi Zouma, Estère) into the fold, and with this sounding board began to whittle down her compositions to the best and brightest.

The songs were recorded in Auckland over 12 hours and released on the debut girlboss EP Body Con, out now on local label Ball of Wax Records.

On Body Con as a soundtrack to autumn: Autumn can be a nice change. You don't feel so bad about curling up and having a lazy day.

ONONO

Last year I went along to a gig in Newtown, and within 20 minutes went from thinking the opening band was incomprehensibly bad to being completely enraptured. The band was local psychedelic pop 5-piece ONONO, and what initially threw me about them would become what I most enjoyed – the off-kilter time signatures, the mosh-heavy breakdowns and the way their songs seem to switch counterintuitively at multiple points. It took a bit to get my head around it, but as with most slow burners it was well worth the time invested.

ONONO is the brainchild of Jonathan Nott, who recorded and released the first ONONO album Bad Posture in 2016, calling on friends and musical allies from previous projects to form the live band when it came time to take the songs on the road.

The Stand EP, released at the beginning of this month, was recorded between Nott’s home in Melrose and at the band’s rehearsal space.

On Stand as a soundtrack to autumn: The first single Pickup Point is a fitting farewell to summer: ‘The feeling of a missed opportunity or not making the most of something but only realising when it’s too late,’ says Nott.

Womb

Womb is a family band but not as you know it. Its members Charlotte and Haz Forrester and Georgette Brown all come from the same uterus – two of them even sharing it at the same time. The music they make is similarly womb-like: listening to it through headphones on a particular kind of day, you might feel as if you were floating in a warm cocoon.

Womb’s debut full-length release Like Splitting The Head From The Body, released last month, has various inspirations, from ‘thoughts while travelling and a drunken moment with friends to fever dreams’, but tying it all together is the muse, their mother. The album is named for the real (but now deeply mythologised) time she cut off a snake’s head with an axe, after it got too close to her babies back when they were living in the forest in Australia.

On Womb as a soundtrack to autumn: Charlotte says, ‘We often get told our music is sad... sometimes too sad to listen to. This album does have a lot more of a "dark pop" feel than ever before. This strange cross of melancholy and elation mirrors autumn quite well.’

ENT

If ‘beautiful terror’ sounds like your jam, or you like music to inhabit all of your senses, then you might want to listen to ENT.

ENT is the moniker of 33-year-old musician Nathan Taare, who grew up on the ‘stony river banks, surreal skate parks and emotional suburban vistas’ of Upper Hutt. Made with a combination of synthesizers, drum machines, gongs, vocals, field recordings, guitars and effects pedals, Taare describes the tracks as ‘long-form ambient compositions and psychedelic sounds with a moody and deep feel’. It’s not ‘background music’, but it is intended ‘to be played as you work away on your own art.’

An ENT performance is never music-alone, and Taare has experimented with scents as well as visuals at his gigs. His background in mixology lent itself to the practice, and before he knew it, he was making perfumes.

In May, Taare will release an album of ENT material. The album title is unconfirmed, but if it were a scent Taare says it would be, ‘a dark and heady mix of burnt blonde woods, dried foliage and lavender, wet leather and animal sweat.’

On ENT as a soundtrack to autumn: ‘I provide the music to bring you down safely into winter. To help the transition and ease the harsh change. Wellington in particular can be aggressive. Sip this back, smell it in and feel comfortable with the change at hand.’