Peter Jefferies' 1990 solo album, Last Great Challenge in a Dull World, opened a world for me. It was early 1992, the year after its first reissue by the Chicago label Ajax, who put it out again in 1995. It had originally been released in limited form on casssette by Xpressway, an imprint founded by the Dead C's Bruce Russell that I thought of as Flying Nun's weirder, more depressed cousin. I had a radio show at the college station, and looking through a pile of playlist releases, I came across the first Ajax edition with a thumbs up from our Music Director, and I ended up playing the whole thing on the air that night. It's the kind of record that, if it sucks you in, will do so entirely. Think of it, in that sense, as the gnarlier Five Leaves Left.
Last Great Challenge is a claustrophobic, private-sounding collection that ranges from homegrown, tinny post-punk to melancholic piano ballads to fucked up tape manipulations to the sound of a man singing calmly (and resignedly) while he does the dishes. As far as New Zealand music in the early 1990s goes, there were poppier groups like Tall Dwarfs, 3Ds, the Clean, and the Verlaines. But there was also plenty of noisier material: the Dead C, Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, Gate, A Handful of Dust, and other material by Jefferies and his brother Graeme, together as Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, and Graeme with his own band as the Cakekitchen. Last Great Challenge found a space between the two camps.
Because it's so personal, my original sense was that it was the work of an individual. Reading the album credits two decades years later, though, I realized many of the people central to that amazing NZ underground scene were on it. Jefferies did record on a 4-track, but in a studio, not his bedroom, and at various points he's joined by the three members of the Dead C as well as Alastair Galbraith, onetime Verlaine Robbie Yeats, David Mitchell of 3Ds, Nigel Taylor, Kathy Bull, and Robbie Muir.
It's a difficult album to describe because it feels so singular. Opener "Chain Or Reaction" is a post punk song, with slashing guitar, piano, and drums behind Jefferies' baritone; it's immediately contrasted by "Domestica", the song that finds him crooning about "throwing it all away" over the sounds of doing dishes (and then revving up some sort of motor). The piano is his signature-- he plays it like he's punching it-- and when he pairs it with noisy guitars, doubled vocals, and backwards tape loops, the sound is all Jefferies'.
While it's a downcast singer-songwriter collection, even the most hushed moments usually include muffled feedback. And there are occasional psychedelic guitar flairs courtesy of the Dead C (they rage, but remain as quiet as whispers). As bleak as it gets, there's also a kind of tenderness. "On an Unknown Beach", for instance, was the tear-jerker then and now. The aching, pretty track, featuring Jefferies alone with his piano, sets the scene of a lonesome winter trek to the beach that comes off, like much of his work, like something bigger: "My back to the water / My feet in the sand/ Finding no recognition/ As each sign of life/ Invades the precision of this/ Aging land." In it, he paints one of his most beautiful, and lonesome, images: "There's a man on the shore line/ With a white parakeet/ Trying to make his/ Bird go home." It's the kind of visual that sticks with you the moment you hear it; Jefferies has a knack for these kinds of things.
Around the time of the original release, he put out a "The Fate of the Human Carbine" b/w "Catapult" 7", which De Stijl includes on this new vinyl reissue. Memory works in a weird way, and I always thought of them as part of the same collection anyhow: The subject matter of his material at this time is dark, and those two songs fold into the tracklist seamlessly. Plus, "Fate" is the song Cat Power ended up covering on What Would the Community Think in 1996: Her take was Jefferies' biggest "crossover" moment until apparent mega fan Amanda Palmer covered "On an Unknown Beach" in 2011.
It's understandable why Chan Marshall and Palmer would be drawn to this work: Like them, Jefferies populates his songs with strong characters and real aches. There are protagonists like the wife who gets up at 6 a.m., has breakfast with her family, then enters an existential void ("Guided Tour of a Well Known Street") and the character of "The Fate of the Human Carbine" who enjoys his time away from his wife before disappearing into his television: "From six to seven he'll be all alone/ So he turns on television/ Doesn't even notices as is the hours roll by/ Gets lost inside the screen/ Watches the film about the evening sky/ It was someone else's dream."
Jefferies released four solo albums after this and played in Mecca Normal and 2 Foot Flame with Jean Smith. In New Zealand, he was also a part of Plagal Grind, Cyclops, and collaborations with Shayne Carter, Jono Lonie, and Chris Smith. In 2002, though, he retired from "professional music." This makes me think of a question he asks during "Domestica": "Will anyone be getting old/ Before they throw it all away?" But it sounds like he's quite content, really: He teaches high school music (drums, composition, recording) in NZ and plays music for special-needs students once a week. It's a fitting move by someone who wrote a record that has the power to change a life, but still remains relatively unknown. Hopefully this reissue helps shift that.
