Review Summary: Where are we going?
If you look to your Southernmost horizon (roughly) and bring your eyelids together in the Eastwood fashion, you may just spy me atop the mighty mountain known as Aoraki, flag firmly planted, babbling ceaselessly about
Avantdale Bowling Club's deserved status as a hip-hop classic. While I have nothing but nice things to say about the wider team of musicians, producers, et ceteras, and et als that line all relevant liner notes, it's the provocative role of MC Tom Scott at the rugged centre of things that cements my unshakeable position; the likes of “Years Gone By”, “F(r)iends”, and “Home” rank as superlative feats of lyricism that fearlessly and accurately reflect the society that I grew up in—a society that tends to pathologically ignore and push aside the down-and-out. This representation is worth the world to fans of Scott's work.
It's worth awards too. The group won many accolades for their debut record, and if Scott was clearly humbled by his acquisition of the Taite Music Prize (he was),
TREES suggests that in the interim his humility hardened into a fear that he's missing the only audience he's ever aimed for; people like him from where he's from. A month before
TREES' release, Scott dropped a video of himself walking the streets of Avondale, copping abuse from passers-by whose voices are dubbed over by Scott himself airing his paranoia. “Ain't nobody from Avondale at WOMAD,” says one. “Fuck these opera houses my g. What happened to the tinny houses?” asks another.
Well, if a tinny house could talk, it would probably quote Tom Scott verbatim. In a moment of heart-rending honesty on "Trees", we're told that his father suffered jail time for his son's crop, dutifully keeping his lips sealed so that Tom could thrive. This is placed in amongst a chronologically-challenged vortex of stories regarding Scott's experience with DIY hydroponics, including the time that he used his Auntie's house as a base (at half-rent, of course) to grow and sell (without her permission) to earn dosh for impending parenthood. In fact, even his first taste of commercial success—which culminated in a No.1 spot for Home Brew's breakout self-titled album and an incident involving a red carpet event and a goat—was proudly financed by the proliferation and distribution of jazz cabbage.
It may surprise a nescient minority of you, but even the title of this album is common nomenclature for marijuana. A friend of mine with a real eye for vegetation tells me that there are even some sneaky nugz hidden somewhere on the cover art. This will come as no shock to long term fans—Scott's passion for the herb was burning just as brightly when I saw Avantdale Bowling Club at a festival that had recently rebranded from the rather earnest-sounding
Joe's Farm to an abstract promise of transcendence in
The Other Side (see you there, brother). Along with this more marketable name, money-chasers and bureaucrats had weaseled their way in. Fences abounded and liquor laws were enforced with draconian fervour, making legal inebriation nigh impossible. The jazz rap collective played while daylight was still burning, celebration still in its infancy. I was curious to see how their sound and messaging might align with the regular run of Pākeha New Year revelry, and my curiosity was sated as soon as Tom Scott hit the stage and thanked his host—“shot for letting us play on your stolen land, Joe”—before demanding to know how we all voted in the recently failed cannabis referendum and slinging joints into a seething crowd that allegedly contained our very own Prime Minister, probably cheerfully playing along, smile as wide as the class divide. The group played a barn-burner of a set as Scott railed on about the housing crisis and meth addiction. The sun set, and the usual run of Aotearoa's finest saw out the rest of the day with some thoroughly enjoyable tunes about gas-burners and snags, and we pretended that everything was alright for a few hours.
Fuck, where am I? As somebody that appears to be getting a contact high just through writing about the thing, I'm relieved
TREES isn't entirely about smashing back buckies and drooling facedown on the sofa. That said, the themes on display will feel familiar to repeat customers: high rents, low wages, easy ways out, and a big Fuck You to politics in general, all delivered with the storytelling flair and instrumental nous that's typical of the Avantdale experience.
Highlights present themselves quickly and thickly. Following the confessional “Trees”, “Rent 2 High” dives in to the nitty gritty aspects of selling drugs to get by, featuring a memorable encounter with a customer who's tweaking off the crystal pistol, and whose speech rattles out “
like an auctioneer[s]” during a dialogue that is cleverly underscored by a steep increase in the subdivisions on the high-hat. Scott ultimately floats him the goods out of sympathy, well aware that he'll never get the money owed. This honest presentation of our more troubled citizens has always been Scott's bread-and-butter, and he carries this torch through the album's first half; “
Small town 'bout the size of a roundabout / where the number one killer of a man is himself” from “Twenty Eight” could just about describe every town in the country. He proves he can still sum up national woes as effectively as personal ones later in the track: “
'bout nine hundred thou for a two-bedroom house / thirteen million hectares stolen by the Crown”. This style of storytelling reaches a logical conclusion on “Late Night @ the Liquor Store”, the most quintessential display of Kiwi-specific lyricism I've heard since the man himself penned “Home”.
This is all well and great (for real), but the interesting question to ask as far as Avantdale Bowling Club is concerned is this: what next?
Avantdale Bowling Club wasn't just a statement album because it was filled with honest-to-God jazz musicians, it was because Tom Scott looked (literally all the way) back on his life, reflected, learned, and grew before our very eyes. As
TREES progresses, I do not hear that growth. “Still Feel Broke” is the closest we get, and a nice reflection on the feelings brought up in the aforementioned promo video for the album, but it's not enough to get us across the line. “Without You”—which effectively acts as the album's closer—backs this up with a rather blurry farewell to sixteen weed plants he mentioned he was growing at the start of the album. The metaphor (perhaps multifaceted) is not explicit, nor, really, even suggestive. Is he done with dealing? Is he done with getting baked and going to the zoo? Did he and his missus break up? Fuck knows.
On that same New Year's Eve that I saw Avantdale Bowling Club put on such a memorable performance, I lay awake in my tent, surrounded by a mob of young adults who were understandably disheartened at the nonsensical 12.15am curfew that put a halt to the jubilation. The music was cut short, and the crowd was herded through a series of fences and gates like cattle, with no subsequent space provided in which one might joyously dance away a year's worth of frustrations. I listened as a campground filled with the cheapest tents and airbeds available from The Warehouse (many people specified they were single-use purchases) was torn apart. Terminology such as “root for a roof” was thrown around, and even the most playful groups of festival-goers had some pretty nasty things to say. Satisfaction was astoundingly low considering the vast quantities of shit Molly percolating through a crowd so youthful and energetic and gathered to celebrate. In the pesky bright morning light to eyes raw from a lack of REM, last night's battleground looked rather similar to what Tom Scott labelled as “anti-vax Coachella outside the Beehive” once the police had forcibly removed the protesters. As people cleared the festival's grounds, the smashed and strewn camping gear that remained seemed enlarged by their absence. Disappointment settled over the fields like the dust kicked up by the departing vehicles.
I'm jaded to the point of numbness in witnessing discontent writ large so frequently, yet art that chronicles such discontent and frames the complainants as real people with real feelings is exceedingly rare in this country. One gets the sense that every Tom Scott project can and should reflect both his and our imperfections to degrees small and large, on a personal and even national level, and
TREES achieves this for the most part, albeit more humbly than its predecessor. Its weak ending even unintentionally doubles as its sharpest reflection; it leaves us unsure of how much of the past to take with us going forward, and completely clueless as to where or what the final destination is.
