Album Review: All Over Tawa

Coming together through the vibrant Wellington indie scene, alternative rock band Living Clipboards‘ Mark Williams, Denise Roughan, and Jim Abbott are already well known from acts such as The 3Ds, MarineVille, and Ghost Club. The basic guitar, bass, and drum tracks were recorded over one weekend in the band’s rehearsal space. Misreading the manual for the 4-track digital recorder they’d borrowed from the Wellington public library has resulted in a sonically diverse collection of songs, contributed to by layers of overdubs required when Denise and Jim relocated to Dunedin, before the album’s completion.

Album opener Tawa Golden Night has a dreamy and full sound, with gorgeous chorus vocal harmonies, lyrically as if relating a fondly recalled adventure, a song like a warm welcome. Clouds is a sweet love song, a gorgeous slice of laid-back pop with golden, bell-like guitar, artfully restrained drums, and a simple but lovely piano line, with a harmonica lending an earthy feel. An ode to feuding neighbours, Off My Chest has fraught and angular guitar interacting with the bass and drums in post-punk starkness, which blooms into something more foreboding before morphing back again, ultimately fading out with a suggestion of peaceful resolution.

There is a distinctly earworm chorus to the fun and happy Jessie, a beautifully composed song. Cicadas could hardly be a more stark contrast, the music of which quite brilliantly evokes the distinct thunder of a cloud of large flying insects. The basis of Teenage Retreat came from a 9-year-old being tasked with writing a real estate listing from the perspective of the house, and it’s a suitably loud and huge fuzzed-out thumper, brimming with defiance and self-righteous snark.

Petrichor is all about one of my own favourite experiences, that glorious scent of rain falling on dry soil, delivered in a richly powerful package of song, wonderfully emotive. Omar’s Holiday is billed as “an instrumental inspired by Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid”. Shuffling drums and brooding bass conspire to produce a sultry and forbidding rhythm, over which guitars jangle and clang, producing a heady musical brew of dark beauty, Lastly, CYMYM rounds things off with an almost folk-like feel, then briefly turning a corner into dirtier overtones before turning back again, a fitting song to end with, embodying many of the myriad moods of All Over Tawa… plus, its ridiculously hooky chorus will be stuck in your head long after listening…trust me on this.

I certainly hope that Living Clipboards manage to overcome geographic limitations to produce follow-up albums to this superb debut. With this amount of serious talent involved, I reckon that’s a pretty strong likelihood.