Album Review: Feed Me To The Doves

Tamaki Makaurau’s Guardian Singles are keeping the spirit of punk alive and kicking with their sophomore album, Feed Me To The Doves.

From the first minute of opener Chad and Stacey, with its references to the peculiar blend of bitterness and displaced envy that is the incel hallmark, it’s clear that here is a band with much to say, and they’re going to make damn sure you can’t ignore them! Drawing primary influence from the American expression of punk/post punk, e.g. Husker Du, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys et al, their sound also carries echoes, to my ears at least, of Killing Joke and similar trans-Atlantic exponents. But wherever this may take its origins from, it’s a powerful expression of the righteous anger that is appropriate for these times.

The second track, Pit Viper dials back a notch on the intensity meter, bringing a stronger harmonic element in to play, before current single Manic Attraction with its ruminations on the toxic nature of conspiracy theories, over a musical structure that’d do The Living End proud. Metal Fingers channels the brooding atmosphere and apocalyptic feel of the aforementioned Killing Joke, which persists, to a degree, through the following Bleak Park, before Com Trans brings the intensity back up, with a beat reminiscent of Mission Of Burma.

The album continues in much the same vein, drawing influences from across the post-punk spectrum, before the defiant closing statement of Ground Swell, a tribute to the curiously Aotearoan phenomenon of a rurally-based gang – the one that likes to obstruct traffic to get their point across. Yes folks, we’re talking about the lobby group known as Groundswill.

Having only consumed around half an hour of your precious time, the band then retire from the scene, after giving a quick update on the state of play in Aotearoa, filtered through the history of punk and post-punk, a worthy body of work indeed. They’ll shortly be touring in support of this effort, so I recommend you have a listen and then get along, if you can!