Throughout New Zealand Music Month we’ll be hearing stories from young musicians about the local songs they love the most. Today, Chelsea Jade talks about songs from Boycrush, Punches, Garageland, Crowded House and Tiny Ruins.
Chelsea Jade. Photo: James K Lowe
After dropping the Watercolours moniker last year, Chelsea Jade Metcalf emerged with her best work yet in the form of her most recent release, Beacons. The EP combines an alluring approach to pop music with delicate R&B-like vocals, while further exploring the electronic-driven direction she’s moved towards.
Metcalf previously won the Critic’s Choice Award at the 2012 NZ Music Awards and was also selected to take part in the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo and the CMJ showcase in New York. With Beacons and a previous EP Portals behind her, a debut album is apparently not far away.
Read on as she reflects on five of her favourite local songs.
Boycrush – ‘The Only One’
The casually brutal lyrics in this song are so in keeping with where my respect for Alistair Deverick lays. I feel confident in saying that both of us seem to welcome and weather one another’s harsh criticisms regarding the most damning of topics in the most casual manner. i.e. – “I was only kidding around, saying you always were the only one.” It’s so nonchalantly scathing and excellent.
Appropriately, the first time I remember really hearing this song was at a dimly lit house party on top of a hill being pummelled by a nasty storm. Alistair was occupying the living room with an early iteration of his live set up and had instigated a kind of naive jubilation through the harsh weather.
I begged to be in the live incarnation of Boycrush soon after and I’ve since used that position to pour bottles of water on fuckboys, accidentally dance in unison with Alistair and repeatedly and inopportunely set off a terrible drum n bass drop jokingly installed on my sample pad. Boycrush shows have served as a catalyst for finding a more visceral approach to making my own songs, in which I want my body to react before my brain.
Punches – ‘Give It Up’
Seared into my memory is the back of James Duncan’s head, framed by a luminous computer monitor for hours on end as he massaged the collected choir of friends into the delicate song Kelly Sherrod had written. It continues to perfectly punctuate the surrounding time for me, on the brink of a devastating break up and preemptively feeling a flicker of that heart dip through the lens of this song and her sensitive, close voice.
It has a touch of that suspension when I hear it now, but with a cloud of affection for how things have evolved with the concerned party. Plus I had John Campbell hug me through a tear spill during the making of the music video.
Garageland – ‘Good Morning’
Sometimes all you need for your insides to curl into their old shapes is to hear the song you couldn’t stop listening to when those insides were young. I was 13 or so when I heard ‘Good Morning’ and it instantly romanced me into oft repeated consumption. It can be used as a marker in time to denote my first forages into seeking music independently of friends and radio. Pre-dating a lust for information beyond a stray mp3, it wasn’t until much later that I learned this was a New Zealand, let alone Flying Nun, band.
Strangely, the source of my affection can be drawn from a parallel sphere as my love for Rihanna’s ‘You Da One’ – the classic nursery rhyme melody. Listening to it now, the “it’s a small town I’ll probably see you ‘round” lyrics have never rung truer than as a slogan for my adult life in Auckland village.
Crowded House – ‘Weather With You’
I would say I first heard this song during one of the warm house parties my parent’s dinners would devolve into. It reminds me of my father and his friends playing guitar and singing together sincerely, but nothing too precious on account of their being slightly drunk.
It reminds me of falling asleep in my mother’s arms, hearing her musical voice as a low hum through her chest. The air has a wood burning scent when this song permeates it, morphed through the haze of a time when smoking was perfectly acceptable. It’s a great song.
Tiny Ruins – ‘Priest With Balloons’
I’ve never been more soothed through a lonely spell than while listening to Tiny Ruins on a New York subway train in the middle of the night. To dispel the romance slightly, there was a threatening line of urine snaking its way down the carriage floor on at least one occasion. Somehow Hollie’s voice can gracefully soundtrack any situation into a gentle metaphor for how everybody, even a trickle of piss, is searching for something.
