For the past three decades a band from New Zealand has tested the water on new genres and been an underlying influence for many of today’s popular indite, punk, and new-wave groups. That band is The Clean, and if you don’t already know them, you should. With the release its new album, Mister Pop, The Clean have set forth on a new journey, stretching outside the confines of a single genre.
The Clean has taken an album with few distinct lyrics and focused the majority of its uniqueness on an instrumental sound that establishes a relationship with the listener far closer than any lyrics could accomplish. Filling the bucket with shooting build ups of fuzzy static and overlapping melodic noises the band takes the listener on a walk down memory lane that is shaped by the way the instruments feed off one another.
Opener “Loog” is nothing short of a psychedelic-surf anthem with an anxiously repetitive organ overriding the echoing background vocals. Its instrumental build up is shared with songs such as “Moonjumper” where the raw emotion can still be heard screaming in the distance in the form of caterwauling violin.
The opening builds a slope for the band to ride down and show its multifaceted sound, as each track sews its own stitch into the. “In the Dream life You Need a Rubber Soul,” is a development of a sound nearly opposite sound from the opening tracks, ass a steady, easygoing melody accompanied by call and response-strumming guitars fill out its structure.
The meat and potatoes of the album can be found in "Moonjumper.” With a symphonic buildup of the organ, violins, and spacey acoustics, it sounds more like an old Doors song than anything else on the record. But that’s just what the album is, a kind of beautiful mess of dissimilarities. There are few songs with words that stand out more than the music backing them.
Mister Pop’s vast diversity builds a mental playground for the listener to swing, run, and climb on. It does for the listener what a conversation with an old childhood friend does, as each song finds a way to remind the listener of what it felt like to be careless and untamed, and that’s something that can communicate with someone who was 20 when the band first came around as well as it can with one who turned that age yesterday.
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