STILL The L.E.D.s

But they might kind of understand The L.E.D.s. Their album came out last year, via a home pressing in Christchurch, in New Zealand’s almost deserted South Island (the isolation helps add the necessary eccentricity to give this its alt-pop glitter), and a lot of people I respected talked about it over the months. But, could I get it in Auckland…nobody had heard of it. Instead I got NZ on Air’s Kiwi Hit Disc 95 in the mail. It was shockingly, gruesomely, awful, and I wondered what had happened to the edge in NZ’s local industry (nobody is buying NZ records anymore…after tens of millions of dollars spent over the last decade by government agencies, it’s the terrifying truth that no-one will publicly admit to, although they are all saying it in private), until I finally found, via Smoke CDs –in Wellington, a copy of …we are The L.E.D.s .I’m in love. I love this album more than I can possibly say, or at least, put into words. This is legacy stuff. I understand this. Any album which references so well early NZ electronica (Car Crash Set and Body Electric), jangly almost early Flying Nun-ish, (although slightly more McGuinn-ish than that) guitar sheen, and yet sounds so absolutely, but simply, contemporary, works well for me. Soft, resigned, melodic and yet, at times, it’s gets resolutely noisy as well. It’s the first perfectly formed pop album I’ve heard from New Zealand this decade. Another album, I understand, is due soon and I’m craving it already.

The L.E.D.S are a garage band, they do it all themselves and almost nobody notices them in the establishment. And then I note that most of those awful records on that Kiwi Hit Disc are getting full signed releases by someone and I understand exactly why, at it’s most obvious level, NZ’s recording industry is in such dire trouble, and yet if you dig deeper, it most assuredly is not.

http://opdiner.blogspot.com/2007/07/like-search-for-murder-clues-in-dead.html