In the late 1980s and early 90s, there was some kind of musical fluoride in New Zealand's water, and the well ran remarkably deep. While the Clean, the Chills, the Bats, and others made nearly-perfect garage-pop for Flying Nun, below ground a stream of more primal rock flowed freely, courtesy of Bruce Russell's Xpressway label. This Kind of Punishment, Alastair Galbraith, and the Dead C. (along with non-Xpressway cohorts like Tall Dwarfs and Cake Kitchen) created rough, impulsive music, equally interested in simple melody and spilling noise. With their distorted guitars, droning keyboards, and subdued singing, they eschewed polish in favor of raw sounds and ideas.
Though some of those bands have soldiered on, the Xpressway sound mostly dissolved with the label's mid-90s demise. So even though Pumice's Pebbles is essentially an Xpressway tribute album, for any fan of the style, it's a welcome knock-off. When New Zealander Stefan Neville (the one man behind Pumice) moans like Galbraith on "Bold/Old", duets with himself in Tall Dwarfs fashion on "Stopover", or rips out plodding Dead C. noise on "Onion Union", it's enough to make you dig out an old Ajax mailorder catalog and fantasize about filling the gaps in your Xpressway collection.
Which is not to say that Neville doesn't add his own ideas to Pebbles along the way. Though fully devoted to simple songs and raw sound, he sometimes applies those tenets to unexpected styles. On opener "Eyebath", his reddened guitar cuts out a rockabilly swing, while on the "Spike/Spear" he patiently builds a reverential, hymn-like drone. Later, Neville's semi-falsetto and ukulele-like strums on "Both Beasts" create a mini-lullaby.
Despite that variety, Pebbles runs dry at times due to Neville's relentless distortion. His fuzzy edges can veer into overly-harsh abrasion, and his off-key tones can melt into mush, creating a kind of sonic nausea. Such moments beg for the more gentle, spacious acoustics of Pumice's previous Soft Abuse album, Yeahnahvienna. But Neville's varied track record suggests he'll someday fuse those styles; until then, Pebbles sits well in his growing catalogue-- a nice salute to a sound that not just anyone could replicate.
