Review Summary: Bedrock Bay
If you ask a New Zealander of the right age and scene, Bill Direen is an underground art prodigy, on par with Richard Hell, Basquiat and John Cooper Clarke. A poet, painter, novelist, musician and producer, the man had been a formidable presence in a big chunk of the country’s youth’s first dabbles with post-modernism in the 80’s. Serving not only as the debut of Direen and his Bilders (oftentimes credited as The Builders), but as the very first record Kiwi indie label of legend Flying Nun put out, 1983’s
Beatin’ Hearts is a heady mash of post-punk, noise, garage, psych and indie rock.
“Moderation” seethes for two thirds of its run, an off-kilter strum and deep bass-line guiding Direen through cheeky verses of dingy settings, before the song bursts into a squall of guitars and pitched screams of ‘Moderation!!’
So light-hearted that it borders on evil twee, “Dirty and Disgusting” slides around jauntily, the guitar just ragged enough to belie Direen’s noisier dispositions. That jangling tone that itches to break out into full-on shredding would have resembled Pavement’s
Slanted period, had
Beatin’ Hearts not pre-dated the granddaddies of indie by almost ten years.
Prolonged Branca and Sonic Youth-like clamour make-up “On the Beach Last Night,” a fitful instrumental dirge. “Inquest” and “Wanganui with a White Face” both follow the quirky, shift-prone tempo tropes of first-wave indie folk, though Direen’s voice, more rugged and casually vexed than the genre’s prime alums, gives every note a punkier slant. “Accident’s” asymmetrical swing brings to mind the kind of nascent no-wave riffing Richard Hell and Lizzy Mercier Descloux were partaking in around the same time, across the globe. The album’s wide sonic reach doesn’t stop there. Early examples of slacker rock and even pre-grunge all get a notch here. It predictably makes
Beatin’ Hearts’s sequencing a bit of a dizzying mess. But for all its sloppy and ramshackle tendencies, there isn’t an individually weak song in the bunch.
The album’s original 17 songs were fleshed out in later re-issues with scores of old material, previously left in the cutting room, distributed across EP’s and sampler compilations, or simply discarded at the time. All of it catches Direen at a moment of his first flourishing as an artist. Though his musical endeavors would take him further into Wire-esque post-punk in the following years,
Beatin’ Hearts’s scrappy songwriting and laissez-faire approach to lyricism is an important point, one that would inform many Kiwi acts to follow. The Clean, Sticky Filth, The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience and droves of others would take what Direen had lit up for them, and take it to its next logical step – a hyperactive DIY indie-punk movement.
Direen’s and Flying Nun’s partisan beginnings are captured perfectly in
Beatin’ Hearts’s cobwebbed production. And though there’s no telling how sharp some of this guitar-work would have sounded like with a cleaner filter (there are no current plans for re-masters of the Bilders’ catalogue), the songs’ grainy, lo-fi angles only add to their value as a document of time and place.
