Album Review: Bits

Gareth Thomas has spent a career finding bright colours in unlikely places. As a member of Goodshirt, the band from Tamaki Makaurau whose homemade recordings, skewed humour and stubbornly catchy hooks defined a strain of early-2000’s Kiwi indie, he recorded much of debut Good on a computer in a garden shed, turning technical limitations into a trademark. He wrote the band’s defining hit, Sophie, a No. 1 in 2002, and its follow-up Buck It Up: two beloved ultra-Kiwi classics.

That DIY streak ran through solo records Lady Alien and 2016’s exuberant Fizzy Milk, and into co-writing and co-producing Amelia Murray’s acclaimed Fazerdaze project. Released late last month, Bits might be his most candid and emotionally complete record yet. Don’t be fooled by the dinky pixellated artwork: there’s some serious sophistication buzzing about on this disc drive. It’s his response. During COVID and beyond, Thomas was living alone and going through a difficult breakup, something had to give.

The brief is grief, heartbreak, anxiety, ageing and “disruptive” life changes, which sounds like a grim night in. Thomas refuses monochrome, tipping jangle-pop, angular new wave, piano balladry, psychedelia, synth-pop and electronic eccentricity into a toy box, shaking vigorously and scooping up whatever rattles out. Hence the title: bits of memory, regret, absurdity and tenderness, gathered after life has broken the picture apart. He calls the process cathartic and “a way to keep my inner child alive.” “Nick Cave eloquently said, ‘Grief is love with nowhere to go,’” Thomas explains in his press. “Essentially, you need a place to put those big emotions, and you need to cherish it.”

Opener Wake Up sets the album’s central tension between darkness and reassurance. “Wake up and see, it’s not that bad” sounds like encouragement until loneliness turns up: “It’s lonely, down here, down stairs with the cat.” Thomas writes in simple, almost childlike phrases and lets the repetition go hypnotic, an intimate appeal to someone physically present but sealed behind closed eyes.

Let It! is workplace satire in miniature: an idiotic boss, a parking fine, a declined credit card and a financial system built on small print. The killer joke is the boss installing a new swimming pool while everyone beneath him struggles to make the sums work. The answer (let go, take the risk, see what happens) isn’t practical, but the exclamation mark is earned.

Therapy Cat, the single, is both ridiculous and deeply affectionate. Thomas wrote it during lockdown, living alone with only a grey cat named Freyja, a gift from his sister, for company. Voom frontman Buzz Moller then challenged him to write a song called Therapy Cat and send it over the next day. It began at the piano, Thomas singing in his higher “here kitty” register and chasing the notes that caught Freyja’s attention. Moller helped restructure it and added the deliberately rickety piano outro, while Jonathan Burgess, Joe McElhinney, Thomas Erasmus and Moller joined as a self-described “man choir”, instructed to sound like a rugby team singing about a cat.

The result is a warm, bittersweet, lightly absurd piano ballad: “Wilson-esque” according to one comment I found online. I dunno if I’d go that far, but it’s beautifully tragic and darkly comic: “Remind me therapy cat / That I don’t need my girlfriend back / Remind me that I don’t need her anymore”. The eccentric idea never smothers the ache. The cat is comic device, companion, witness and emotional life raft: “You have just become the best way to pass these days / You have just become the best….Therapy. I’ve got you / We don’t need her / Don’t need her back…”

We look at our phones roughly 85 to 113 times a day, which makes Cyber Star such a brash, provocative jab at selfie culture and democratised fame. Uncomfortably timely. Its central joke, “you don’t need a guitar”, skewers the notion that talent and craft are prerequisites for attention; these days you need a gimmick and a camera. “With your pretty, pretty face / you’re posting it all over the place”. Craving attention or just acceptance in the swipe left/right universe. The subject’s “15th minute” updates Warhol for the feed, and the cheerleading curdles into an ego-pricking taunt.

Lilly Knows Electricity is the most ‘Goodshirt-ish’ thing here: funky, infectiously boppy and one of the album’s sweetest celebrations of musical discovery. Unpicking the name checks, I think I’ve cracked it. Lilly, Gussyu and “a guy on the drums with a big grin” can only be the Capital’s own fabulous indie heroes Mermaidens (aka Gussie Larkin, Lily Paris West and Abe Hollingsworth). Thomas caught them one New Year’s Day and was thoroughly smitten with West, who makes guitar pedals, solders electronics and, according to the song, sings like Björk “from the bottom of the earth” and plays “crazy scales”. Not a bad day’s work.

The electricity isn’t just technical; it’s the current crackling between musicians and listeners, and on an album steeped in grief, a narrator who feels good again matters. When Thomas sent Mermaidens the demo, West replied that the band were “awestruck” to have inspired it and revealed they’d just recorded a song inspired by Goodshirt’s Sophie. Full circle, fan mail swapped at volume.

If cats are a recurring metaphor, so is ‘waking’, here as  the realisation on Unfortunate: “I wanna wake and walk away / I wanna wake up and walk away / If this is you / If this is you yeah / A mistake is a mistake I can take / This is just Unfortunate.” The song wraps bitter betrayal in damaged analogue media and malfunctioning computers. Thomas wants to rewind or “control-alt-delete”, but relationships don’t come with restore points, and a favourite cassette jamming, snapping and spilling its tape is beautifully specific. Some damage can’t be rewound with a pencil. The title sounds like understatement; the conclusion isn’t. Cheating is not an accident. It’s a choice.

One of the cleverest concepts is Love Resume. I’ve often thought swipe-right apps were basically doom-scrolling on Seek, and I’m evidently not alone: “It’s a love resume / Of love gone thin / I’m not re-recruiting / But expressions of interest are still welcome”. Post-breakup dating as a soul-destroying recruitment drive is, as my friends will attest, every bit as brutal as job hunting. Yet it isn’t cynical. The narrator is technically free but doesn’t want to be, reluctantly treading water, and the business vocabulary is a protective layer over loneliness. That tension is the sting.

Brief and bruised, Lady Blue is hindsight arriving fashionably late. The narrator remembers a smile that never quite reached the edge of a cheek and realises he cared more about where his partner had been than how she felt. Thomas lets him own it rather than blame her. It’s sweet but slightly ‘undercooked’; I kept waiting for a big bang of techno-noise or a mid-tempo swerve. Still, an album this generous can afford one quiet moment.

At just over two minutes, Happily is one of the record’s stranger miniatures: waiting near a parking door becomes sweating, suspended time and oddly cosmic speculation, with gravity seemingly uncertain inside a mall. “Happily go so slow” reads as soothing, ironic or both, and the other-worldly synth-bop adds yet more ironic juxtaposition. “Wait around under the wall / There’s no shadows in the mall / What’s this waiting waiting for / As the beads begin to fall.” A credit card hijacked during a big sale? Partner returning with bad news? Waiting to meet a new love interest? Take your pick.

A panoramic dream-rock anthem tinged with regret, Words That Don’t Come Back is about the permanence of a temporary lapse: a quip fired casually from the hip strikes someone “square between” the eyes and cuts deeper than intended. “I wasn’t meaning to be mean” is both apology and inadequate defence, and the repeated “come back” is a futile request to words already lodged inside somebody else.

And we’re back to the family pet, canine this time. My Dog tackles anxiety, indecision and modern life’s exhausting menu of choices. The dog speaks in a peculiar code, qualifying everything with “only if you’d like”, while the narrator wanders day and night: “Wonder why you wander around all night and day / wonder why you’re wandering around all night and day,” Like the cat in Therapy Cat, the dog is a safer route into difficult feelings, with anxiety found in movement and hesitation rather than clinical language.

The album closes with Thomas’s musical interpretation of Wavesong, a poem by Sam Hunt whose speaker imagines returning as a wave moving between summer beaches, winter isolation, estuaries and distant coast. Sung through a highly synthesized, space-ethereal vocoder, it becomes an outer-world aural landscape. I can’t tell if the intention is humorous, ironic, deprecating or just spacey. Perhaps all of it. It fits: a wave breaks, regathers and returns, and after an album about things that can’t be taken back, Wavesong finds consolation in transformation rather than restoration.

Bits was written, produced and performed principally by Thomas, continuing the computer-driven, home-recorded approach of his Goodshirt days. He still calls it “bedroom recordings”, but the finished record carries the fingerprints of a musician creating high-end value on his own terms, moving between acoustic instruments, synthesisers, drum machines and computer production. He also made the hyper-coloured, 8-bit-inspired rainbow cover, an accurate summary of the music: fragmented, pixelated and nostalgic, but bursting with colour.

Its strongest quality is refusing to confuse seriousness with solemnity. Grief appears beside pixel art, betrayal becomes a broken cassette, anxiety speaks through a dog, heartbreak sits at a piano with a cat, and the indignities of modern employment are met with a shouted exclamation mark. It’s an album about getting older that resists sounding old. Rather than recovering the person he used to be, Gareth Thomas collects the surviving bits, adds electricity and builds something new.