Music News - Ōtautahi artist Ben Woods announces new album 'Dispeller' + shares 'Hovering At Home' single/video
22 April 2022 - 0 Comments
Ben Woods comfortably leans into intuition and abstraction on his beguiling new album, Dispeller, out July 15th through Shrimper / Melted Ice Cream / Meritorio.
The album's first single/video,
Hovering at Home is available today.
Says Woods of the video, “Hovering at Home is about the magical world we hold onto in hermitude. Initially, I thought it was about hiding, but as we carried on building the song, I came to realise it was more about finding points of connection between that inner world and the outside.
The video is a retelling of a paranormal experience I shared with my cousin as a child. One night we were visited by an inhuman entity dancing at the window. Initially, I was frightened of its thin gyrations but have come to think of it as a fond memory.
Tom Tuke (the puppeteer) and I spent days trawling through the markets and charity shops of Auckland before Martin flew up to join us. We worked at a small studio that was built into a desolate train stop. We built hillsides from Chinese winter melons, and devils out of fish guts and bones. Stashed away with Tom and Martin, carefully building this surreal universe, felt like the right way to serve the spirit of the song.”
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Today, Ben Woods announces his beguiling new album, Dispeller, out July 15th through Shrimper / Melted Ice Cream / Meritorio, and unveils the first video / single, Hovering at Home.
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.
Dispeller out July 15th, 2022 on Melted Ice Cream (NZ) / Shrimper (USA) / Meritorio (EU/UK).
Photo Credit: Emma Wallbanks
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