Bang! Bang! Eche!
Bang! Bang! Eche!
Self Released
By Jose Fritz
The band began as a naïve attempt at music-whoring. Two friends, James Sullivan and Pez Mahoney drafted some high school drop-outs and tried to score a publishing deal by writing bland pop tunes suitable for audiences in elevators. Their Hollywood dreams were crushed and they remained in Christschurch, New Zealand. They didn’t have it in them to be whores, bland or otherwise.
It was all worthwhile. Bassist T'Nealle Worsley needed to be less of a whore. There was a long growing need to get right, to write the music that was buzzing around inside her head and to give up Muzak. Disillusionment is a mandatory hurtle to cross in order to reach adulthood. She snapped one humid summer night in 2007. She’s the one with Viking blood; they should have seen it coming. We’re all just lucky there was no looting or pillaging. She wrote two albums of new material in one week. For them the world changes by the following weekend.
Vocalist Zach Doney now drove a raucous synth-rock riot more manic than the Faint or the Rapture. They land somewhere short of the frenetic proportions of Mindless Self Indulgence, making themselves a soul mate of sorts for Daiquiri or VCR. It’s a place where jagged synthesizer noises accentuate dance beats and the lyrics swing from meaningless to oddly coherent. They don’t caricaturize the genre; they just press all its boundaries, and all it’s buttons.
But as New Zealanders, they are on an island of influences. Your typical gathering of Brooklyn indie rockers were not influenced by Moron Says WHAT?!, Radio Birdman, Blam Blam Blam, and the 3Ds. The oeuvre of the entire ill-named kiwi-pop scene and the Flying Nun label were massively important to the building of New Zealand’s rock culture. The biggest mistake a critic could make here is describing this record only in the terms of our own western musicological framework.
Last October, Bang! Bang! Eche! awoke one morning, in a pile of half dressed limbs and bodies with severe bedhead and smeared eyeliner. They are now a lean, mean new-wave, post punk machine. That Fall they won a local music contest called the SmokeFreeRockquest. They toured Australia, Europe and the United States in 2008. Not bad for a band from a city of 150,000 on an island whose main business is acting as a transit depot for Antarctic flights.
So where will our heroes go in the next episode? Tune in next time to find out. The step from nothing to something is the biggest most difficult step in a bands career. That wobbly step is sometimes even taken by accident. It’s the second one that is so intimidating.
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