You’re sitting in an average suburban home. A family is sitting at the dinner table in front of you. The mother enters from the kitchen and attempts to pour a 2 litre bottle of unbranded cola into her husband’s glass and spills it everywhere. “Has this ever happened to you?”

A boomer sits in their lazy boy, speaking into a corded telephone. There is a bowl of off-brand cheese balls on the arm of the chair. They finish their call, and as they hang up the phone, the bowl is knocked from their couch, transforming their plain white carpet radioactive orange. “What about this?”

A grandmother and a body builder stand side by side, both struggling to open tightly sealed pickle jars, and a voice is screaming…

“Do you find yourself staring at the wall during lockdown? Do you find any semblance of familiarity grating? Are you bored of your overbearing spouse, and degenerate kids? No longer finding joy in the music you used to enjoy? Have I got a deal for you!

"Introducing Vengeful Millennia, new from Hazza Making Noise.

"Don’t settle for stucco. With just one drop of Vengeful Millennial, you can transform your boring ordinary wall into a psychedelic dreamscape. The results speak for themselves. Just hear what these satisfied users say about Vengeful Millennial…”

The camera cuts to a disheveled character, buried in headphones and hunched over a keyboard. Unshaven, and filthy, he’s obviously been in lockdown since the first outbreak. This isn’t your average D-List actor, paid to promote this product. Beneath their face is a title card reads Muzic.net.nz reviewer. Satisfied customer.

The creature speaks. “Well… I didn’t know what to make of it first…  But it’s alright, aye.”

If only all my reviews could be so succinct.

Alas, it’s obvious that a lot of effort has gone into this album over a long period time. It deserves a little more of my attention, and yours too.

Let’s pretend this is a physical release, and pick up the packaging. Borrowing extensively and irreverently from Pearl Jam’s Self-titled/Nothing/Superun-owned/Avocado album, you could pass Vengeful Millennial off as the typical bedroom musician release at first glance; lo-fi, abrasive, idiosyncratic and unmarketable, with limited production values. Big ideas, poor execution. Doomed to be buried under the mountain of crap on Spotify, and disintegrate.   

You’d be mistaken.

If this is home produced, as I suspect it may be, this EP has perhaps the highest production values and attention to detail of anything I’ve reviewed this year. Expertly mixed, carefully produced, energetically played, this is one home brand product that could easily be confused with something owned by The Coca-Cola Company Inc.

The borrowing stops at the cover. It has what we called in some paper during my Arts degree an ‘authoritative voice’. It doesn’t feel like Hazza Making Noise is borrowing from their influences. Rather, how they play feels like their voice within, no matter the style of the song. A constant voice and aesthetic retained over five very different songs.

With the genre-hopping, Vengeful Millennial puts the experimental back into EP. Actually, it’s less hopping, than mashing. Underneath it all there is a solid 90’s alt-rock backbone, fleshed, muscled and skinned by electronica and pop. Wrap that in psychedelic cellophane, and serve with an avocado. Profit.

Vengeful Millennial may be highly produced - it’s not just a yuppie with a guitar - but it doesn’t feel manufactured. It retains that authenticity millennials used to climax over in the early days of YouTube. You know, before the constant ads, reaction videos, and “OMG. Like and Subscribe you guys”

Now, bath in the hypocrisy as I react to each track. Don’t forget to Like and Subscribe.

NoMoreGaps: Take the title NoMoreGaps literally. There is no stopping from the next 24 minutes. I don’t think I’ve seen another album where the tracks bleed into each other so seamlessly. All without leaning on boring fillers or segues.
I’ve reviewed this track in isolation previously and enjoyed the experience at the time. The swirling trippiness has been cleaned up making it more swirly, more trippy. A solid post-alt-rock banger.

Boomers in Disguise: While it’s a solid Soviet-era stompfest, I’m afraid we’ve reached a point where generation memes are more passe than the word passe. Who in Gen Z have the vocabulary or bourgeois aspirations to use such a term? I’ll let this song slide though, as this feels like an EP that has been in development for some time. At the time of its inception, it would have had the potential to be an anthem for the attempted war against those preventing the trickle-down effect from trickling.
It sounds a lot cleaner and wider than when it was reviewed as a single. Remastered and extended with a cinematic breakdown, starting all choral and acoustic and building into the sped up ending. Cinematic. That’s how I’d describe this album as a whole. Cinematic and bright.

Rewind Time Return Desire: This is the rest and rinse patch. After the energetic rock opera preceding it you need it. More fuzz, and you could mistake this for a forgotten 90’s alt-rock track. I got Placebo vibes from this one. Placebo, Pearl Jam, Live, and that time Marilyn Manson’s band quit and he tried to not sound like Marilyn Manson. Difference being Hazza can actually sing. Probably the favourite track on the album, mostly because of the nostalgia, partly because of the chord progressions.

A Ship Came Into The Harbour: Is this a song about Auckland? You know how songs feel like places sometimes. It’s the brightest feeling song on the album. All the tracks have a certain brightness to them, actually. Superficially of course. Once you’re a few plays deep, and have the lyric sheet the subversive nature of the lyrics becomes more evident. This track really shows off Hazza’s vocal range. It starts slow, it ends strong.

NoMoreCows: This one is kind of an outlier. Quirky and bouncy, with less real world analogues. Until it gets heavy, then it’s Velvet Revolver’s Slither. And then when you think it’s over, it goes into a Vengeful Millennial reprise and mixes portions of previous tracks. The more creative wordplay, political, and inflammatory musings of the album hide in this song. It’s a scathing, pessimistic view, and I’m all for that. Is this about Trump or the British occupation of New Zealand? It doesn’t matter. It’s an anthem of the disillusioned regardless.

Masking musings on life and the Millennial zeitgeist with a mixture of the soundtrack to Gen X and older Millennials, this is an album worthy of more praise and radio plays than it’s getting. Catchy enough for those that feel the beat, cerebral enough for the thinkers, weird enough to make its mark.   

5 out of 5 stars

You can find Vengeful Millennial on the Hazza Making Noise Bandcamp.

• 1
  Take Hold
• 2
  Coridian
• 3
  Devilskin
• 4
  Skinny Hobos
• 5
  L.A.B.
• 6
  Head Like A Hole
• 7
  Katchafire
• 8
  Shihad
• 9
  Blindspott
• 10
  Written By Wolves

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• 1
  TOO SWEET
  Hozier
• 2
  BEAUTIFUL THINGS
  Benson Boone
• 3
  LOSE CONTROL
  Teddy Swims
• 4
  LIKE THAT
  Future And Metro Boomin feat. Kendrick Lamar
• 5
  END OF BEGINNING
  Djo
• 6
  I LIKE THE WAY YOU KISS ME
  Artemas
• 7
  WE CAN'T BE FRIENDS (WAIT FOR YOUR LOVE)
  Ariana Grande
• 8
  STICK SEASON
  Noah Kahan
• 9
  TEXAS HOLD 'EM
  Beyonce
• 10
  LEAVEMEALONE
  Fred Again.. And Baby Keem

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