They were the best band you'd ever want to see in a dark smokey dive where the sweat drips off the wall and the high notes ricochet off the pillars directly into your synapses. They blew our minds with their pummel and fuzz and then they upped digs and off to New York, USA. And after a few years and a couple of barely-noticed releases, pretty much disappeared below the radar.I've just undergone a personal Bailter Space renaissance and it's taken a recent evangelical turn - from getting their CDs and LPs out after a long, long while, to regularly featuring tracks on my radio show, to uploading Bailter Space mp3s to friends in Scandinavia and North America.
Bailter Space - Shine (4.55 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)
Bailter Space - Robot World (6.05 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download)
So here we go with the proselytizing. Well, actually I'm going to keep it pretty low-key. Shine is from Bailter Space's US breakthrough EP The Aim, released 1991 on Matador, and Robot World the title track from from their 1993 follow-up LP. They are the more melodic highpoints of the band's repertoire and as such feature little of the aural bludgeoning that underpinned other tracks; be asured that live, however, they stood toe-to-toe with the rest.These tracks... this band... was just gorgeous. We always reckoned they were better than My Bloody Valentine, the nearest comparison you could ever hope to make. Now fifteen years later, we were right, and Bailter Space needs to be heard again.
We still reminisce about this gig and that gig, this album and that. Perhaps their time is yet to come.
[Note: After a couple of false starts in the mid-80s Bailter Space settled on a line-up which was basically a reformation of The Gordons, notorious sonic terrorists from half-a-decade earlier and reputedly the loudest band in New Zealand. Stay tuned for a Gordons post soon.]
5 comments:
nice post on bailter space. you shuold go all the way & point people to nzmusic.com to buy the albums still in print....
In fact i'll do it for ya- http://store.nzmusic.com/cd/35137
I discovered them and the skeptics when nick roughan (tour sound man) played us pre-release copies of the box set & robot world on the conventionalToasters/Shihad/Head like a hole tour. That makes me feel old.
have you heard the turnbuckle ep (photon)? it's quite rawkus. I'll lend it to you if you like.
tanker tanker tanker
listened to this the other day for the first time in years and felt all uplifted and kinda tranced out - closest feeling to being on drugs.
it's a tanker.
One Welly Bailter Space gig I went to I got fucked up on tequila beforehand. I lost my glasses at the gig (in an old car parking building or something - concrete walls and floor and hence a brilliant sound).
Got hassled by the rozzers afterwards, but just as me and the guy were getting really aggro, the guy I was with discovered he'd flatted with the older sister of the filth he was talking to, and that calmed things down a tad.
This was 10 years ago or so, and they were still younger than us, so you're just a young 'un Mr W ... Head like a hole indeed.
Simon I'd love to hear the Photon ep. Kindly be forthcoming. :)
got a link to the whole album?
joerocks198@hotmail.com
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