Port Chalmers four-piece Seafog have been with us for a few years now, pumping out some very well received doses of cross genre guitar type stuff — Raise Your Skinny Fist (2016), Dig It On Up (2017) and Animal Lovers (2019) — that each seemed to be spawned from a world none other than Port Chalmers itself. This week sees the release a further full album from the same place, Slow Death.

From past outings, Seafog defined itself as a band that was doing no nonsense guitar music to be played loud. It was alt but sometimes sort of country and sort of grungy. They looked and smelled like 10.30 pm in Chicks Hotel. (Admittedly, the classic venue had closed by the time Seafog produced Skinny Fist — but you get the point.) This was a band that sounded and played like pros but were to be seen up close in a small venue, where you would step on guitar leads, talk to them between sets, queue with them for pints and know that they knew all the same people and places you did.

Slow Death begins with a sense of a familiar enough setting, with Up the Harbour. Ostensibly it’s the Otago Harbour, with Rob Sharma singing “Come on momma, there’s a big ship coming up the harbour.” It’s a jingly jangly alt country piece in the manner of Lambchop or the Silver Jews, perhaps even like some early Wilco. On the face of it, happy-go-lucky guitar, fuzz guitar, dead straight bass and drums — it all seems straight as a die — but here’s a grown man telling his mum there’s a ship coming in. In Port Chalmers. What’s he really on about? It’s suspicious. If it’s something else, then what?

The second track The Twist confirms the situation, at least in a broad sense. Now we’re into something more overtly critical — though it’s never revealed of quite what — and it’s louder and more sinister. “Even though you know it, it’s called the twist …. I bleed, believe, resist, resist…” Next is Heavy Territory, where “There’s heavy territory going down, going down inside my mind.” At this point, the volume and intensity are still rising. Nigel Waters’ and Rob Sharma’s guitars, along with Andrew Barsby's bass, are akin to Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, while Marty Sadler’s machine-gunning drums resemble Larry Mullen in War era U2. In some moments Sharma almost ceases to sing and instead speaks to us, “You’re a man of the sky! Look at you fly!” Whatever oblique present or future he’s singing about, it seems certain to be a Black Swan event that we should have seen happening, if only we’d been listening to him.

From here the path is set. On Influences “It’s gonna be alright!!” Sharma tells us, his voice disingenuous and unmasked. On Moa, an instrumental, the band sound like Fur Patrol’s Lydia but soaked in a pint of vodka and stout for a week down at the Port. On Warm Flows Sharma returns to his unreliable or otherwise tortured narrator. “I think you know everything’s gonna be fine,” but the message seems clear as day that it’s not. The closing and brilliant track Sick tops it all off wonderfully. “I feel so, so bad you’re sick! … I’m definitely so sad you’re sick!” It’s not physiological sickness that seems to be the topic. It’s the loss of whatever the truth is, conflicts between people he's known for years, the loss of friends, autocracy and societal woes that consume the narrator. “I see a fire burning in the harbour!” It seems that he certainly does. And if you didn’t know yourself that it's there, by the end Slow Death you certainly will.

It’s a cracker. A record of the times to be taken seriously. Listen to it.

• 1
  Anxiety Club
• 2
  Devilskin
• 3
  Coridian
• 4
  Skinny Hobos
• 5
  Take Hold
• 6
  Shihad
• 7
  Head Like A Hole
• 8
  Villainy
• 9
  Katchafire
• 10
  L.A.B.

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