Sex and Love around the world Unknown Mortal Orchestra is the most thrilling pop band to emerge from Aotearoa in the past decade, reckons ardent fan-boy And new album Sex And Food might just be their best yet...
Grant Smithies.
Falling bombs, napalm, Nixon. Anti-war protest marches, helicopter gun-ships and the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. These are some of the things that drew Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson to Vietnam to record his latest single, American Guilt.
The heaviest song on the band’s new album Sex and Food, it sounds like some mythical lost collaboration between Hendrix, early Nirvana and Marc Bolan of T. Rex.
Savagely distorted electric guitars spasm and buck behind Nielson’s high, wavering vocal, the whole shebang sounding queasy and frazzled, the lyrics dripping with disgust for a nation whose high ideals do not tally with bitter reality. What a song!
I’m amazed to discover that pummelling guitar riff was laid down during monsoon season at a tiny studio in Hanoi that usually records Vietnamese folk music.
‘‘Yeah, and that was all down to Jimi,’’ says Nielson, in Auckland visiting family before returning to Portland, Oregon, his home for the past decade.
‘‘It was Hendrix who took us to Vietnam, really. We were going to record in New York at his famous Electric Lady studio, but I associate Hendrix first and foremost with songs like Hey Joe and All Along The Watchtower which were played a lot during the Vietnam War. So we went there instead, thinking of Jimi, and cut the main track.’’
The vocals were added later, in Mexico. Things did not quite go according to plan.
‘‘We were over there during those really terrifying earthquakes and we ended up sleeping in the park. I thought we’d get hassled by local street gangs, but all those people were really looking after one another. I saw a side of Mexican culture I would ordinarily never have seen. It restored my faith in humanity, in many ways.’’
I feel I should state early, loud and clear, my deep devotion to this band. No pretences to objectivity or dispassionate analysis can be made for this story. I am an ardent admirer, an impassioned advocate, a sweaty ranting fan-boy, if you will.
They may be based in Oregon and contain a few gifted Americans in their touring band, but there’s a case to be made that Unknown Mortal Orchestra (UMO) is the most bold and bent and thrilling and colourful pop band to spring up from Aotearoa’s cultural compost in the past decade.
For supporting evidence, you could point to a tidy pile of Taite Awards, Tui and Silver Scrolls, but who cares, really, about all that jazz? You have only to trust your ears to realise that UMO is a very special sonic proposition.
A badass guitarist with a deeply distracting ‘‘third eye’’ tattooed on his throat, Nielson began the band as a solo project soon after moving to the States, multi-tracking hazy psych-pop ditties alone in his basement studio.
These songs caused a ruckus in the underground music press. Other band members were drafted in. Three fine albums followed, each better than the last, and the fourth – Sex and Food – is released this coming Friday.
Nielson’s restored ‘‘faith in humanity’’ seems to be a central theme of new record. While pot-shots are taken at corrupt governments and greedy corporates, there’s a feeling of deep empathy for his fellow citizens: a sense of emotional generosity, care and concern.
The thrust of many songs seems to be: here we are, together, living through troubled times. How can we look after ourselves, and each other?
‘‘I didn’t want to write blunt or preachy songs about politics, but one of the defining things about this current era we’re living in is that you can’t really escape that stuff,’’ he says.
‘‘I wanted to explore the emotional backdrop to our times, I guess – the anxiety and frustration – and also to celebrate our resilience in the face of that. It seems to me that you need to dig deep and use your own creativity as a weapon, or a shield, against all that painful stuff.’’
Made alongside American bassist Jake Portrait, with Nielson’s brother Kody – formerly his bandmate in The Mint Chicks – on drums, Sex And Food flits between sounds and styles with ease.
It feels like a deepening of what’s gone before: a confident, wide-ranging record that spot-welds the strongest elements from his three previous UMO albums into a sturdy, yet streamlined, hybrid.
There’s the inventive melodies and loopy lo-fi psychedelia of 2011’s Unknown Mortal Orchestra debut, the druggy, folk-drenched soulfulness of 2013’s II, the ornate sexed-up synthfunk of 2015’s Multi-Love.
The album darts around from hard rock to disco, indie art-pop to folk ballads so light and buoyant, they threaten to blow away in the breeze. If this album was a critter, it would have a short attention span, an attraction to bright colours and a punishing work ethic, just like the ‘‘Hunnybee’’ mentioned in one of the album’s strongest songs.