A band named Plaines has recorded an album in New Zealand. Plaines is one person and others, people interested in construction sites and aimless highs, in palm trees and polyrhythms, people who have no problem with rain in the city or with getting home slowly. Plaines is a youth split on that strange blade of antipodean ennui and awe, perhaps one just like yours.
The music you will hear is music from that crack, or somewhere close: distillations, the impression of glancing sunlight and dust motes at dusk; it’s the sound of the sea at a distance, a quiet canvas moving behind voices breathless and soft, the air close between the whispered confessions of friends. Transition: you sense the ocean become wind through trees. Another: now it’s radio static.
“This record sounds like a particularly wistful cheesecake; it sounds like honeymoon acid-sex taped from two doors down the hall“: a note on a record from New Zealand outfit Plaines.
i find it hard to say
abstract binds me anyway
accept it presently
summer hatched; summer left
It is a gift to be articulate, to know your thoughts and say them. It has been a gift to walk day-tired and visiting down those narrow stairs and through the walls hear Matt feeding truth into the microphone, conjuring anger and mystery, zen and glee, nostalgia next to anticipation; to hear him chipping at the ineffable with keys and strings, assembling sympathies for everything strange in our surroundings and striving to make sense out of the sense-memory in rhythms and tones, and making it.
It’s rarer than we think, fixing that desire, and the guitar might be the best way to do it, to wrestle with that thing that makes messes with ten terrible words for every wise one; the hunger that pushes us through four a.m. windows to glimpse the moon on our pasts, to hide soil-ridden in the backs of pulled-over vans and see red-blue lights reflected in each other’s eyes; to cave in stages and climb over crowds and into warm arms or dangers drunk and armed; the same thing that at the very least explains how come everyone wants to smoke that much weed. We’ve got ten thousand stories and totally ran space for them here, but there’ll be time, and you can have these seven and a half songs instead.
This record sounds like a particularly wistful cheesecake; it sounds like honeymoon acid-sex taped from two doors down the hall. It sings of possums and rowing machines, and clinging on to sinking suns; it’s the morning rising up after a long night of becoming. Plaines is out now courtesy of Ball of Wax, and you could hear it today.
Plaines is available now. Listen above.
