I really hope that the limited edition version of this reissue of Robert Scott's "The Green House" will still be available. I heard about this on New Year's Eve, but already posted for the day, and had my New Year's Day post queued.
I would have thought "The Green House" would have gotten a post of its own by now, but I would have posted this again regardless. Ally Records (Raleigh, North Carolina) has been issuing and reissuing excellent New Zealand based music (among other things) for years, but this has to take the cake. Not only do you get the remastered album (originally released in 2014 on Flying Nun/Remote Control), but the first 50 orders get a hand drawn print signed by Robert Scott.
If you don't know, Robert Scott (Dunedin, New Zealand) is best known as the lead singer of The Bats, but was also the bassist in The Clean. He also released music as The Magick Heads and Electric Blood. His voice is instantly recognizable and as are his melodies. On this album he had the good sense to enlist Hollie Fullbrook (Tiny Ruins) as a guest vocalist.
The LP reissue will come out sometime in the spring.
This never got posted somehow following it's release in early 2019. Listening to the collaboration with Hamish these last couple weeks made me want to revisit. This album has an expansive yet also intimate feeling. Like the album cover. A quiet scene amidst a huge space. Hope we get a follow up from Hollie Fullbrook in one form or another in 2023.
NZ songwriter Hollie Fullbrook opens up the strummy, self-reveal significantly in this third album, enlarging her pensive ditties with dramatic gestures in strings, percussion, keyboards and additional guitars. She does this deftly, without sacrificing the personal, idiosyncratic connection with listeners. You still feel like she’s telling you, craftily, in meter and metaphor, about a series of events that made an impression on her.
The first song Fullbrook wrote, the one, according to interviews, that led her in this more expansive direction, was “One Million Flowers,” and you see why. It has a satisfying heft and drama. There’s a punch and recoil in its reeling three-four rhythm, a surging surety in the way its French nightclub melody gains strength from massed “ah ah”s, twinkling keyboard and raucous percussion. Fullbrook sounds like she’s been caught up in it, buoyed by its warm density and tossed this way and that by waves of tuneful melody.
Other songs work on a smaller scale, sparely, precisely and without fuss. “School of Design” employs an agile, bell-like acoustic guitar to frame its narrative, as Fullbrook muses about the careful work of art, as well as its transporting, transrational power. She walks through empty studios and pores over dusty archives in the verse, then gets caught up in ecstatic bursts of creation at the payoff. “I was struck by a feeling, it’s hard to describe, the urge burst through the ceiling, stunned, raised glass to the sky.” The song, too, alternates between meticulous preparation and exhilarating climax, marching plinks of glockenspiel, distant percussion and rumbling insinuations of noise.
Here as elsewhere, Fullbrook’s voice is soft, bright and mostly unornamented. She has a way of fluttering up the octave at the most dramatic lyrical payoffs, her high pure soprano voice skittering off away from sentimentality, into a birdlike realm of pure tone.
There are some striking images. Amidst the bright, glittery keyboards of “Sparklers,” Fullbrook sings “I wrote your name in cursive on the air, flailing my arms around me, conducting down to the wire,” both the words and the music evoking the evanescent fizzle of sparklers, summer evenings and new love. Later, in “Holograms,” a song embellished with jazzy vocal slides, she speaks of battling the grim reaper, saved in the end only by a Darth Vader souvenir helmet. Yet while whimsical, the song carries a warmth and longing in it; each chorus ends in the title, with the final syllable of “holograms” lifting into sleepy, lovely flight.
Fullbrook is quite a good singer, a subtle lyricist and a skillful crafter of melodies, but in Olympic Girls, she pulls all three aptitudes together in an organic way that is more than the sum of its parts.
