Family Band
The Dog Box EP
Available from Bandcamp now
Family Band might sound like a folk group singing around a forest campfire but New Zealand’s noise trio make enough of a full metal racket to make your ears bleed.
It’s easy to moan about algorithms ruling our musical world but here’s a fantastic new band that I – and hence you – might never have discovered without their digital magic. And, looked at another way, without the recent death of Steve Albini.
I was streaming the latest (and, sadly, last) Shellac album and when it came to an end I thought I was listening to a bonus track. But I wasn’t. I’d seamlessly moved on to another band making the same visceral noise as Albini’s outfit.
Family Band are a new name to me and come not from any of the expected sources – not America, not Scandinavia, not Eastern Europe, but New Zealand. Or, as they call it, Aotearoa. Sam Shepherd (drums), Maté Vella (guitar, vocals) and Brandee Thorburn (bass) prefer to use the Maori name Aotearoa for their country, and the Maori name Tāmaki Makaurau for Auckland.
The power trio was formed last year by the three flatmates from the city, booking their first show before bassist Brandee had ever picked up an instrument – a properly punk way to launch themselves. They say they are inspired equally by Chicago noise rock of the type pioneered by Albini and the less familiar (to me, anyway) genre of “late 00’s Trans-Tasman post-punk,” rooted in repetition, unease and pain.
This song – Large Dirt Piles – is only the second they wrote together as a band. Over a repetitive rhythm and squalls of disjointed guitar, Vella’s doomy baritone screams about the “irreversible damage” of intergenerational trauma. “The song itself is about passing generational trauma down your family tree and trying to become the one that stops the cycle,” says Vella. “It’s become even more prevalent in my life now that I’m becoming a father.”
New Zealand evidently has some music scenes we don’t know about yet, judging by a blog there that describes the band’s influences as “Naarm post-punks MY DISCO… and a gritty dose of AmRep noise-rock chug.” According to our Kiwi friends their sound also brings to mind more familiar names such as Big Black, Die! Die! Die!, METZ and “some of the more industrial-leaning NZ bands of the late 20th century – Skeptics, early Headless Chickens, NRA.”
I’ll take their word for it. In the meantime have a listen to Spit, which Vella wrote as a “tribute” to the landlady of his old apartment, explaining: “One time she walked past a literal hole in the wall to complain about some dust on the windowsill.” It’s the second song taken from their debut EP The Dog Box, available now on Bandcamp.
And I apologise right now for borrowing quotes and background info on the band from blogs in New Zealand because I have been unable to find any direct links to the band beyond that Bandcamp page and their Instagram account. They have no PR, management or record company representation outside their homeland as far as I can see. But hopefully some of those will read this and in due course Family Band will find their way to these shores.
We can guarantee them a warm welcome here.
More of Tim Cooper’s writing at his Louder Than War author’s archive and at Muck Rack. He posts music daily at EatsDrinksAndLeaves.com
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