It makes me feel old to say that I've been a fan of The Chills and The Verlaines for more than 30 years now. And even though I stuck by Martin Phillipps and his various line-ups over the years, I lost touch with the world of Graeme Downes and The Verlaines at some point in the mid-Nineties. While Phillipps ended up doing some of his best work on a major label, Downes did not, with the few albums the band cranked out on Slash being largely average ones when held up next to anything from earlier in his output. Those were lean years for fans, with Downes only surfacing at times since, most notably in 2012 for the last proper Verlaines record. However, now, with the release of the new Dunedin Spleen, it thankfully feels like a fresh start for the famed New Zealand musical genius. This new record, out now as a download with vinyl on the way, is nothing if not an epic of invention, with Downes filling this to the brim with wire-y guitar hooks and bookish lyrical observations. This should be an easy record for fans to love, even as one acknowledges the possibility that Graeme Downes may reach a whole bunch of younger listeners now, given how smart the pop on this behemoth is.
From the brilliantly witty "Church and State", an astute near-show-tune, and on to the swirling "Here We Are Again" it's clear pretty quickly here that Downes has found his muse again, or, rather, that a muse has found him. Graeme speak-sings over the sort of riffs that one can trace back to that other Verlaine, or Richard Lloyd, with "This Will Not Go Down" and "Canterbury South" rattling forward with the same sort of bad intent one found on old Triffids or Saints releases. Elsewhere, Graeme veers into territory very nearly as special as that mapped out on Bird Dog with the elegant "Anthem" and its "Marquee Moon"-like climbing hook, while the lovely "Scientists" offers up a melody that, oddly for me, seemed to recall sides from both Joy Division and The Go-Betweens.
It's eerily affecting music that one finds Downes and co. making throughout Dunedin Spleen, with the resulting compositions on this epic-length release serving as examples of a new kind of chamber pop, wrought, ironically, by a guy who very nearly coined that term with his earlier stuff in the Eighties. If the complex "Man Selling Poems" echoes Dylan, it also seems, in its angular chord patterns, and spiraling organ-lines, a sort of nod to the modern classical composers Downes likely studies and teaches in his day-job. And if the elegiac "A Crib at Flatline Bay" features as many nods to Debussy and Ravel, as it does to, say, Bill Evans, it's still very much a Graeme Downes composition, full of the usual world-weariness that seems to creep into his vocals even when he's clearly full of emotion, and singing atop a downright beautiful melody.
A record that seems the natural next step from Bird Dog, despite the intervening years and releases, Dunedin Spleen is a feast of the fruits of the talents of one of the two or three best musicians to have ever emerged from New Zealand. Messy, shambolic in spots, and yet oddly precise and considered in others, there are enough ideas -- both musically and lyrically -- in these 19 songs here to please anyone who's still playing old Pavement and Fall albums over and over again. And, frankly, this is the exact kind of music Malkmus and his Pavement buddies were always trying to make but they were too in love with being smart-ass stoners to fully lean into the wind, and lead with the heart, the way Downes does here. Dunedin Spleen is less chamber rock and more art rock, such that one hears lots of what's here and thinks as much of Beefheart as, say, Built to Spill, than, for instance The Left Banke or even The Verlaines circa 1987. Haunting, perplexing, vexing, and full of real vigor, Dunedin Spleen is the best Verlaines record in at least 25 years or so.
Dunedin Spleen is out now. More details via the link below.
More information on The Verlaines via the official Facebook page.
[Photo: Uncredited picture from the band's Facebook page]