Image: Salad Boys
Named after Dylan Taite, the respected New Zealand music journalist, who among other things, chased down a dazed Ozzy Osbourne at an airport, cornered Lou Reed in a pharmacy and interviewed Bob Marley while playing soccer, the Taite Music Prize, is awarded for the best New Zealand album of the year.
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Taite, who died in 2003, wasn’t swayed by celebrity or commercial success, but was driven by unfettered enthusiasm for great music and since 2010 Independent Music NZ have judged the prize on originality, creativity, and musicianship.
Previous winners have included Lawrence Arabia, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Lorde.
We belive, like Taite did, that creativity is that what matters most, so we’ve picked our three finalists from the prize list and three who didn’t make the shortlist but deserve to be slamming tequilas at the party tonight in Auckland when the winner is announced.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Going from their record at the Taites for the last few years, you’d have to be picking Ruban Nielson and his Portland-based band for the win. Multi-Love is their best album yet and comes through fresher than anything on the finalists list. It’s not easy for musicians from New Zealand to get noticed on the world stage but Multi-Love was at one point the number one selling record on vinyl in the US and has had serious international acclaim. Built around a multi-love affair between Ruban, his wife and another woman, the material was undeniably great for publicity but, even better, it inspired multi layers into musical mad-scientist Ruban’s insomniac studio sessions. The Taite is about innovation and challenging the status quo. Ruban and UMO do just that.
Nadia Reid
“If I am bound for something, honey won’t you know, that I always take the shortest fucking road”, sings Nadia Reid in her woodsmoke and honey tones on “Reaching Through”. This wise young folk singer from Dunedin well deserves her direct route to the short list. At 24, Reid self-released her debut album Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs. She’d only been playing guitar a few years and had barely racked up enough years of heartbreak to shovel into this wistful, reflective collection of songs that are achingly intimate and when added together create something almost cinematic in scope. A bruised but quietly self-assured heart adrift on a deep, dark South Pacific tide. Awww.
Anthonie Tonnon
Earnest in all the right ways and rock when it matters, no wonder the some-time journo/muso Anthonie Tonnon comes from the home of Flying Nun. The ex-Dunedinite buttons up his collar and takes on social issues with literary flair, and somehow manages to do so with rhythmic drive and soaring melodies so that he has about sweaty sold-out gigs howling about councils and water rights at his live gigs. Telling stories through music in the tradition of David Bowie and Lou Reed with doses of Kraut-rock and Pulp, Tonnon’s second release Succcessor is packed with rock and pop anthems that give a damn about the world.
The Situations
The Situations’ second album Forever Scene Changes is a fantastic hybrid of early 70s New York City rock, 50s Sun Records, The Beach Boys Surfin Safari era and straight up, good old fashioned New Zealand rock and roll. It’s tongue in cheek, it’s irreverent, and it’s really great.With most songs on the record not breaking the three minute mark, The Situations aren’t here to fuck spiders. Singles, “Hamburg”, “Only One” and “Suburban Girl” are great starters if you’re just discovering the band for the first time.
Proton Beast
In a year where a reformed HDU played their first show in forever at Auckland Laneway Festival, it’s good to see we haven’t totally forgotten how to send in the sonic assault. Proton Beast sound like a doom version of the Skeptics, or Fuck Buttons if they played guitars. There’s a healthy dose of The Gordons in there too. All of that said, Proton Beast own it, and their album Digitizer sounds like Proton Beast. Not anyone or anything else. It’s heavy, it’s loud, it’s dynamic and they know how to build a song bigger and bigger and bigger.
Salad Boys
The Salad Boys‘ debut album Metalmania is misleadingly titled. At its most upbeat it sounds like Ric Ocasek fronting The Bats covering Tom Petty. But at no point does it sound like maniacal metal. Not that we could care less, because it’s still a killer record. Salad Boys owe a lot to 80s Flying Nun records, which it sometimes feels like New Zealand bands get unfairly punished for. It’s fine for Stephen Malkmus, or Jay Reatard, or Kurt Vile, or Ira Kaplan to wax lyrical about how much the seminal label influenced them, but as soon as a band that’s actually from New Zealand sounds like they’ve been influenced by their own, people seem to get pissy. Whatever. Once again we think this is a great album. It’s on high rotate at the office and if the Taite prize shortlist only had six finalists and we at NOISEY were choosing them, this record would have been one of them. A great debut.
