MINT CHICKS
Screens
(Flying Nun/Valve/MGM)
I’m going to draw a long bow here and recall another band on Brisbane’s Valve label that started off shaking up the rock mould with their infectious and raucous tunes – that band was Regurgitator, and New Zealand’s Mint Chicks seem to be on a parallel trajectory of the weird and wonderful.
Both The Gurge and Mint Chicks started off in a straightforward fashion, creating tunes that were instantly awesome and infectious, but whereas Regurgitator headed into synth pop territory, The Mint Chicks with this, their third album, have leapfrogged into some real strange avant pop weirdness. Gone are the angular guitars that held aloft the shrill banshee wailing of Kody Nielson. Replacing it is futuristic and fractured bubblegum weirdness that thinks it’s turning Japanese (‘Hot On Your Heels’) and Beatle-esque, walrus melodies on heavy doses of the brown acid (‘What A Way’) that have more in common with other fringe Flying Nun bands like The Tall Dwarfs than even the band’s own back catalogue. Musical statements like ‘Sweet Janine’ and ‘Telephones’ could be twee if they weren’t so scattered full of musical palpitations. The band calls their sound “troublegum” and they might just be spot on there.
Stopping short of some kind of Residents art concept over musical statement, The Mint Chicks have in some ways reinvented themselves in the mould of nothing even remotely obvious and it’s this that makes Screens such a hard thing to swallow and such a marvellous musical statement to spend weeks and months mining your way through. It’s like all the cool shit of the 80s might have been worth something as it’s devoured and… ahem, regurgitated back up by its youth!
HHHH     Alex Gillies