Digital Regress: Slugfuckers, The Shifters, NZ Release Bundle

[digitalregress]

Hello! Long time no post..

We've got two reissues out from New Zealand's The Kiwi Animal

hit digitalregress@gmail.com for wholesale



The Kiwi Animal - Mercy LP

DR 41

https://digitalregress.com/collections/digital-regress-records/products/the-kiwi-animal-mercy-lp

Digital Regress's foray into the fabled NZ underground hops over to the North Island for two exquisite pieces of acoustic DIY and shadowy, cracked pastoralia.

After a few years spleen venting at the front of Wellington art brutes Shoes This High, Brent Hayward struck out on his own, self-releasing a few EPs as Smelly Feet before forming The Kiwi Animal with Julie Cooper in 1982. The duo released their first album, Music Media, on Massage Records (their own imprint) in 1984.

With the addition of Patrick Waller on cello and sundry other instruments, 1985's MERCY finds an augmented Kiwi Animal trying on what at first glance is a more refined, melancholic sound. But the group's experimental bent, largely restrained on Music Media, soon shows its hand. Pinprick ur-folk guitar themes, blinking on and off, buffeted by radio interference and toy piano; woozy bedsit slow-burns; the arresting croak of Hayward's penpal, William S. Burroughs; even a foray into dosed synth-pop: MERCY presents a unique yield of fraying, autumnal DIY songcraft.

The music of The Kiwi Animal, moody and intelligent and often abruptly gentle, works subcutaneously, propelled by guitars that churn and weave – no jangle here – and a his 'n' hers vocal delivery for the ages. Digital Regress is happy to make these essentially perfect records available again.

Pressing info: printed on deluxe gloss jackets, 100 translucent red vinyl and 400 black.



The Kiwi Animal - Music Media LP

DR 40

https://digitalregress.com/collections/digital-regress-records/products/the-kiwi-animal-music-media-lp

Digital Regress's foray into the fabled NZ underground hops over to the North Island for two exquisite pieces of acoustic DIY and shadowy, cracked pastoralia.

After a few years spleen venting at the front of Wellington art brutes Shoes This High, Brent Hayward struck out on his own, self-releasing a few EPs as Smelly Feet before forming The Kiwi Animal with Julie Cooper in 1982. The duo released their first album, Music Media, on Massage Records (their own imprint) in 1984.

Billing itself "New Acoustic Music," the Kiwi Animal's debut is a set of introverted and austere yet lambent folk songs. Textural, gently hypnotic guitar chords anchor minimal arrangements, as Hayward and Cooper's entwined vocals – think Pip Proud meets The Vaselines - project paranoia and forlorn, diffident cool. Wry, imagistic lyrics somewhere between the stoned political economy of D. Boon and the head-fuck soliloquies of Robert Ashley complete The Kiwi Animal effect.

The music of The Kiwi Animal, moody and intelligent and often abruptly gentle, works subcutaneously, propelled by guitars that churn and weave – no jangle here – and a his 'n' hers vocal delivery for the ages. Digital Regress is happy to make these essentially perfect records available again.

Pressing info: deluxe-gloss jackets with 100 copies on white vinyl and 400 on black.

[digitalregress]

Hey all we've got two new releases coming out next month from Australia's Slugfuckers and The Shifters.
Also we have a specially priced bundle of all of our NZ releases from last year.

https://digitalregress.com/
https://digitalregress.com/

Slugfuckers - Transformational Salt LP



Pre-Order: shipping April 10th, 2020

"Slugfuckers’ sole full-length Transformational Salt, originally released on Tom Ellard's (Severed Heads) Dogfood Production System in 1981, is an absorbing slab of Australian DIY, dense with thought and fury. The album brings together reprobate dub poetics and thug-drubbing spite in a mangled collage of post-punk disjunct and proto-industrial churn. Art and subcultural adherents are roundly slagged throughout. The group emerged from a college milieu in Sydney, and they’ve been categorized alongside contemporaries Bleeding Arseholes, Rhythmyx Chymx and N-Lets as anti-music ensembles prizing untutored spontaneity. More useful comparisons include Desperate Bicycles and the Pop Group. Also credited for a sound that seems to collapse, but could also be described as openness or constant fluctuation, is the then-newly translated Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guatarri. Terry Blake (guitar), John Laidler (guitar) and Graham Forsyth (bass) formed Slugfuckers in the late 1970s, with Austin Laverty (drums), Craig Wilcox (keyboards, percussion) and Gordon Renouf (saxophone, bass, guitar) joining later. Transformational Salt followed two 1979 singles, Three Feet Behind Glass / Live at Budokan and Instant Classic." - Sam Lefebvre


The Shifters - S/t LP



Pre-Order: shipping April 10th, 2020

I wrote about the debut cassette from Melbourne’s the SHIFTERS in the very first column that I did for MRR three years ago, which gives me all sorts of complicated and confusing feelings about the passage of time. And as evidence that sometimes it takes awhile for historical wrongs to be righted, that criminally limited tape is now finally available in its entirety as an LP on the new French label Future Folklore, following the two songs that resurfaced on the Creggan Shops 7” courtesy of It Takes Two back in 2016. The SHIFTERS’ stark, repetitive minimalism and shambolic charms always owed more than a little bit to the FALL in their early years, and revisiting the material from the cassette now after Mark E. Smith’s passing only reinforces the psychic connection between the lackadaisical post-punk twang in “Captain Hindsight” and the cracked melodies of something like the FALL’s “Your Heart Out” from the Dragnet era. “Creggan Shops” is as close to a contemporary successor to those brilliant first two MEKONS singles as I’ve come across, from the tense interplay between the melodica and a creaky violin, to the scritch-scratch guitar, to the nonchalantly harmonized dual vocals, all sounding like they’re perpetually on the verge of coming undone. There’s way more at play here than blatant UK DIY worship, though—it’s not a huge jump from the homespun, pastoral pop of ‘80s Australian DIY legends like the PARTICLES and the CANNANES to the SHIFTERS’ raggedly melodic “Colour Me In,” and “The American Attitude to the Law” sprawls into a lengthy VELVET UNDERGROUND-addled haze, if only LOU REED had written songs referencing “drinking cough syrup to fall asleep” instead of heroin.
-Erika Elizabeth, Futures & Pasts | MRR #421


New Zealand Release Bundle



A limited heavily discounted bundle of all of our NZ releases from last year:

Alastair Galbraith - Morse LP

Maxine Funke - Lace LP

Maxine Funke - Felt LP

The Kiwi Animal - Music Media LP

The Kiwi Animal - Mercy LP