13 July 2022 - 0 Comments

Watch, Ben Woods' impeccable short film; Dispeller - which premiered via The FADER, earlier this week. The film features live performances of three tracks from the forthcoming record Dispeller out this Friday, July 15.

Directed by filmmaker Martin Sagadin (Aldous Harding, Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams), Dispeller, the film features Woods and a shifting cast of artists from Aotearoa performing takes from the record at The Sitting Room, the portside shack where the record was made with Ben Edwards. Woods' homemade demos and chopped footage navigating his hometown Ōtautahi Christchurch are stirred through these performances.

Woods notes, "Part of making this record for me was experimenting with and understanding space. With recording, it was the studio versus where I felt the songs wanted to transport the listener. And through writing, it looked at the natural projection of where I was geographically and the people I was making music with or whose music I loved.

Making this short with Martin— who's directed most of my videos and knows me inside out— was how I wanted to share that less abstractly. Piecing the songs with my friends in the spaces where I made the album. Not to paint a portrait of myself, but of all those external forces that built me."

On the first performance in the film, Dispeller's closing track White Leather Again, Woods and his band offer a poised thought on riding the tides of our neurosis. "I've got a prison made of porcelain embedded with gold/ and drenched in all that's mighty/ and dressed in all our symmetry/ and pressed so hard for a change we'll walk away, but then we'll go" he and Lucy Hunter (Opposite Sex) chime together. Woods' warbling guitar with IRD Rory Dalley's backbeat drumming anchors the song, making way for the synthesiser and organs that whirl overhead.

Luke Towart of Wurld Series cameos, pushing the outer limits of a tape machine in a simmered and sax-laden version of Hovering at Home. Right before a late and weary-eyed take on Fame, Dispeller's opener, with Ryan Fisherman crooning through a phone.

On Dispeller, Woods’ intimate experiments in rock paint a vivid portrait. Here, the New Zealand artist leans comfortably into intuition and abstraction. Expansive arrangements are anchored by heavy-lidded prose, while carrying the air of the portside shack it was made in.

Dispeller was recorded throughout a year in Woods’ hometown, Lyttelton, with Ben Edwards (Aldous Harding, Marlon Williams, Julia Jacklin) at the helm of the mixing console and co-producing. Utterings, footsteps, and the rattles of the room linger beneath the album’s dense instrumentation, alluding to the familiar space the songs were captured in. Here, Woods’ songs breathe and flourish into their own worlds. “I found my voice in trying to make atonality croon,” he says. “With Dispeller it was less about harmony — the blend was capturing the songs very honestly in the room, and still making each of them to transport you somewhere different.”

Even beside Woods’ acclaimed debut, Put (2019), which saw him sharing stages with Aldous Harding, No Age, Julia Jacklin and Steve Gunn, Dispeller enchants. The songs here are stronger, the instrumentation stranger. Hovering At Home features mangled tape machine interjections and manipulated sax. Clusters of unsettling piano tip Teething toward the surreal. With chopped and screwed vocal contributions from underground hero Alastair Galbraith, Speaking Belt snaps and pulses with the sordid clatter of a lost Xpressway single. Charlotte Forrester from Womb (Flying Nun) adds their diaphanous voice to The Strip and Punishing Type. On fragile duet Wearing Divine, Lucy Hunter (Opposite Sex / Wet Specimen) threatens to steal the limelight, before a full hive of Marlon Williams’ honeyed vibrato comes spluttering out of what sounds like a rusted can.

Woods' melodies bring to mind Scott Walker's dramatic tunefulness, while his voice holds something of Gordon Gano's waver, pushed through New Zealand vowel mangling. Dispeller's arrangements hit at the subtle, reactive instrumentation of late-era Fugazi, the glowing murk of Grouper, the Antipodean-gothic drudge of Tall Dwarfs, and the mechanical outer crust of Sparklehorse. However, while Woods experiments with the disparate and the disharmonious, it is the open heart that elevates Dispeller. His voice holds the physical and spiritual middle; flirting with, but never succumbing to the splendour and turmoil which surround it.

Presave Dispeller / Preorder Dispeller

Photo Credit: Emma Wallbanks

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