the coolies (!!ssuxx!! Records)
All the excitement generated by the new noiseniks on the block, and their often-times excellent racket, has tended to obscure some of the old stand-by’s they’ve snuck in thru the back door. Men are back, as if they ever really left, and if there’s any ladies about the mic’s the only thing that needs holding (until after the show, anyway). The city’s back, you can’t be making no future without some bohemian backdrop to add a sense of historic gravity to yr stylo. And art’s back, you need a little detachment and a design/conceptual background to really hang with the new autocrats. The Coolies have none of those things and more, and that just might be enough to save them.
Wind the clock back a few years and you’ll find them cutting class to listen to Bikini Kill, Patti Smith and X-Ray Spex. After a protracted garage band upbringing they headed north to Auckland City, where they stormed on to the scene with trashy power rock, and soon fell into support slots with the Beastie Boys, Cat Power, and Rancid. A seven inch on Girl Alliance followed, but momentum seemed to fall away just as the world seemed to be softening toward those who take the rebel stance. While their regular bill sharers the Datsuns exploded, the Coolies quietly split, with a slot on Kill Rock Stars comp (alongside the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) looking like a nice epitaph to yet another coulda been story.
Only that was never their style. They re-emerged in 2002 with a new dynamism, packing a sharper, sicker sound. Tina pared her guitar back to looping basslines or sheet noise, while Sjionel's Casio bleeps and bloops maintain momentum when all else is determinedly falling apart. New drummer Fei plays spare, stinging patterns that make it incontrovertibly clear that this is dance music, move or be moved, just not the way you been sold it of late.
The new line-up's second show was supporting their NYC heroes the Dictators, a straight to dictaphone demo went to number one on bFM , and after a year of hammering the local boards, including a few killer shows with sister band the Mint Chicks, they began recording their debut album.
Dragging Tex Houston out of self-imposed isolation to man the desk, they spent a fevered week whipping their set into studio shape. Intricacies that were lost in the wash in their live set grew to prominence, and new intros and codas were frantically constructed in down time. The unfamiliar pressure had its own rewards, though, and songs like Come to the Sabbath and Fake Letter are a blueprint for the under-explored mid-point between the Dead Boys and the Shangri-la’s, punk rock torch songs which mesh lovely with the polyrhythmic propulsion of Mix of All Good Things and D.I.Y., while Dance is their true heart: they don’t ask it; they demand it.
While certain influences are apparent, the sound is unequivocally their own, that of three girls from the southside fixing to run things, taking the long road cuz it’s the only one they know. The Coolies is the culmination of seven years of frustration and false starts. This is their one shot, and one listen to the album will tell you which side you’re on.
