Any Club That Would Have Me as a Member

Blah Blah Blah

Dead Dog in Port Chalmers (1991)

An Xpressway single.

David Mitchell & Denise Roughan who have a plethora of New Zealand band experience between the two of them but whose musical life intersected most notably with the 3Ds.

3Ds were one of my personal favorite Flying Nun bands and I have a Crowther Audio Hotcake overdrive pedal because I read somewhere that David Mitchell used one. (And rightly so, it's a beast and doesn't lose any of the low end of your guitar signal like your average overdrive pedal.)

This lo-fi excursion is as close as Xpressway got to folk music.

It is for folks after all.

The Ghost Club (1996)

Five years later and they followed the previous up with another one and moving to London where they formed a formed a trio they called Ghost Club like this record who put out two really fucking cool discs that kind of hit the sweet spot for me.



Perfect music for the days gather into a cold semi-permanent gloomy dusk for a few months.

This should tide you over

I  have to go to grocery store so I have something to cook to bring for lunch at work for this week.
Content yourselves with this brief compilation until I get back.

I Hear the Devil Calling Me (1991)

With this mere seven inches of black vinyl Drag City introduced a larger swath of the American listening audience to the lo-fi goodness that was the New Zealand label Xpressway.

Twelve songs by twelve artists. All around a minute in length.

This was a big fucking deal at the time. Still is as good a time capsule of that moment, that scene, as you're going to get at this juncture and from this distance. We ate it up. We used it as a guide to what we needed to listen to next. We followed things to their logical or sometimes not logical conclusion.

You do the same. It's good for you.

Thanksgiving

So today for this festive Thanksgiving holiday I give you the Five Blobs with a delightful and entirely culturally insensitive novelty song entitled "Rockin' Pow Wow". The 50's truly were a magical time.

  the Five Blobs (1959)



For me however the b side is the clear winner here. "From the Top of Your Guggle (to the Bottom of Your Zooch)" just sounds delightfully raunchy provided you don't pay too much attention to it. I'd totally guggle your mama's zooch.




To make matters up to the more culturally enlightened who feel grievously wronged by the previous musical selection allow me to present the Plagal Grind ep.



Plagal Grind (1990)

This was a sort of underground New Zealand supergroup with each band member coming from some other well considered NZ band. It was pressed once by Xpressway in some kind of really low quantity. (the number 200 comes to mind for some reason) and I only have a copy because I bought the second to last copy from Peter Jefferies at the Uptown Bar & Grill the night he and Alastair Galbraith played. I'm pretty sure that most of these songs have been rereleased on various other things over the years, but I'm also pretty sure most of that shit's out of print as well by now. Besides there's folks looking to get 300 clams for this little slab on Discogs. I think that's kind of silly.