Bilders / - Neverlasting
NZ Listener
In a digressive interview with the Listener online recently, marking his Arts Foundation Laureate award, writer/musician Bill Direen credited the many musicians he'd worked with over the decades to realise his genre-shifting songs. Among them, drummer Malcolm Grant who went on to join the Bats.
However Direen's 2024 Dustbin of Empathy and this new one - both with multi-instrumentalist Alex McManus and bassist Matt Swanson, formerly with American alt-country indie rock band Lambchop, and a few former Bilders - are more consistently self-contained.
That's welcome news for those treasuring his 1983 Beatin Hearts, which Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd considered "a masterpiece" and "totally timeless". Here are 15 typically idiosyncratic songs, which include the portentous jangle of White Guitar and intimidating political thugs doing their rounds in Blam Patrol in "a town of eyelids of glare and gloom, of beings in charge and beings unhinged".
There's also finger-picking guitar with an unsettling background lyric between the foreground vocal on Shakin'; Danced All The Same is an oblique love song and there's spoken word over a disturbing soundscape on the political Tetrapak ("dumbing the voice, numbing the choice, so rats can have the run of every palace").
Direen combines easy-entry songs with loaded messages as on Hard to See ("It's not hard to see what's going on, starvation, cruelty. Then it's hard to see what's going on") and the title track reminds us "we're the neverlasting renter-squatters of Earth exhausted".
After decades of albums going straight past most people, Direen's return to a more distilled approach is engaging and effective. But it's Bill, so you should have expected that reference to the Greek science philosopher Empedocles.
