Critic Home Baking Review

MUSIC REVIEWS

Home Baking

n

Onanon I Am Evil Records / Mad Fish Wish It seems like forever since Hang On I’m Still Mutating, the last full-length from twisted Dunedin pop rockers Onanon. Now, I’m usually not one to labour the importance of geography on a musical scope, but as has often been noted – often by the band themselves – their sound is firmly rooted in Dunedin’s beatified musical past. The Clean have always been a big influence, and remain so, but while you can find homage in

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plenty of the guitars or the instrumental, Glen Ross’ songwriting in particular takes a wrong turn somewhere and ends up alone in a padded cell – at ‘Seacliff’, perhaps, with a head full of datura. But it’s a trap, and well before it even reaches half way, the album has sucked you in and made a junkie out of you, leaving you itching for more in the days to come. Don’t let the domestically minded album art fool you, this can be pretty dark stuff,

16/09/2008

but the majesty is how it never gives the game away. Are they laughing at me, or having a complete mental breakdown, or both? Whatever the case, I don’t trust the recipes in the liner notes. “I don’t think we have a choice, Satan is captain,” Ross sneers on

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‘Strawberry Feel Up’, and by the time this is revealed you start to think he might be right. There’s nothing extraordinarily complex in the music of Home Baking. Arpeggios open up a handful of the songs, and Karen McLean’s krauty basslines build the snarling metal road they drive down, passing bitter friends and lovers and all manner of social anxiety along the way. Onanon do write love songs, too, and at one point Ross is even so devoted to offer up the sale of his internal organs. Several times. The whole album chugs and kicks along, fuelled by fuzzy paranoia, but rarely kicks into the raw fury that you see at their shows, or at a rarified GROSS gig. ‘Angry Monkey’ comes close – ‘Neverending Story’ closer still – but these are made all the more dramatic

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for the reining in of the dynamic, tempering the nightmare from midnight to dusk. On the opener, ‘I Don’t Know What Came Over Me’, they sum it up perfectly: “No more Norman

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in Normandy / I don’t know what’s come over me / I like you I think you’re cool / I let the devil steal my soul.” The lyrics are insanely clever right through, and it will be worth

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collecting the 180g vinyl edition of it for the hand-written transcription that will come with it. It has social conscience, too, with Donald Ferns’ too cute ‘Nice Planet’ both a white flag to global warming, and an ode to the last of the frogs. Onanon are one of the only things that validate the now seven years I have spent in

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Dunedin in the name of higher education. In first year, we would play comedy gigs to nigh on nobody. After we packed up, Onanon would play gigs with similar attendance.

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It was more like we were sharing a practise room than anything else. In the interim years, my comedy career has gone nowhere. They have turned into one of the best New Zealand bands of their generation. Hopefully Home Baking will make more people

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aware of that. Onanon play live at Chick’s Hotel in Port Chalmers, this Friday 26 September, with I Am Evil boss Ed Gains and The New Self.

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