New Zealand leads

post-punk: the gordons - "future shock" e.p. three immaculate songs, "future shock", "machine song" and "adults and children", by turns sparse, hypnotic and vicious, great minimalist lyrics ("your mother's telephonics made you mad!") and a fantastic sheet-metal, proto-albini guitar sound.

Cheers 'cb'. 'Sheet-metal' always gets me wet. Is it danceable, or experimental p-p?

The Skeptics
Kiwi Animal

Birchville Cat Motel

(hi cameron!)

Great- I'll try and track them down in Wellington- which is where this exiled Yorkshireman is residing just now!

(hi!)

actually the first headless chickens e.p., with stuff like "totalling dad's car" on, is pretty good too, and even their first album, "stunt clown", has some great tracks ("do the headless chicken" esp.).

wholeheartedly second the skeptics (albums "III" and "amalgam", "sensible shoes" e.p.). hard to describe, they don't really seem to have any obvious precedents. kinda musical parthenogenesis.

primitive electro: "pulsing", by the body electric, who were from wellington, i think. it was pretty famous, but i can't remember if it was really that great.

Excellent, excellent (much scribbling in notebook)

I remember the vocals for "pulsing" were a bit awful actually. But I can't think of much other NZ electro.

And Kiwi Animal were more soft-acoustic than spiky post-punk. Actually I'm not sure if I grok what kind of "post-punk" is meant here. AK79? Is this excluding 80's Flying Nun?

yeah, i think the vocals to "pulsing" were pretty awful.

foetus productions weren't awful tho', if you can find anything. recommended tracks: "flicker", "what's going on?". a 'comparison' that suddenly sprung to mind is the legendary pink dots, similiar kinda creepy, fragile weirdness, but given that my memory of the latter group is based on half-heard student radio from almost 20 years ago, it may not be terribly accurate. doesn't matter; if you can find foetus productions stuff, get it!

Die Die Die

Oh cock and balls! I missed Die Die Die playing last week in Wellington's 'Indigo' venue. Ah well, next time...Where was Foetus Productions based?

snapper's first ep and album. the second album disappointed me like few others. the vader/gentle hour single is great though.

there was drill, they were kinda post-punkish but they were also horrible.

new stuff: die! die! die!, the mint chicks, this night creeps, leper ballet
old stuff: gordons, naked spots dance, wallsockets, Life in the Fridge Exists, Beat Rhythm Fashion, Blam Blam Blam (well, some of the stuff off of 'maid to order'), some of the Bored Games and the Clean's early material, 8 living legs, flak, fetus productions (who were auckland based btw), freudian slips, normal ambition, queen meanie puss, screaming mee mees, skeptics, snapper, this kind of punishment, tinnitus, yfc...

note that a lot of that stuff veered towards pop punk, but were in general terms pop bands

plus pop mechanix and danse macabre had their moments

I second Pop Mx (get the 5 CD's from Failsafe in ChCh) and the new Danse Macabre CD on Universal NZ, excellent sound.

Two essential compilations to get that captures all this are "It's Bigger Than Both of Us" - http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sgrigg/Bigger.htm - and "AK79" - http://www.flyingnun.co.nz/archive_site/bands/compilations/ak79pr.html.

This page - http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sgrigg/propcat.htm - has a history of Propeller, an Auckland independant label of the time.

Try http://www.smokecds.com/ http://www.realgroovy.co.nz/ or http://www.marbecks.co.nz/ for these.