Tiger

Description

I read a review once where a guy said they played this album every day at a cafe he worked for six months, and never got sick of it. So says Big Ross from the Bird Nest Roys in the liner notes for the deluxe reissue of Superettes inimitable, standalone 1996 album Tiger. Emerging from the dissolution of Jean Paul Sartre Experience in 1993, Dave Mulcahy and Greta Anderson found themselves in New York with a handful of song skeletons. Recruiting childhood friend Ben Howe back in Auckland, Superette was born. The band combined Mulcahys signature sound-bending guitar and melodic ear for a pop hook with Andersons muscular drumming, triangulated by Howes energising, sinewy bass and guitar lines. One of Flying Nuns mid-90s gems, this deluxe re-issue of Tiger features the album along with the bands debut EP, Rosepig, b-sides from the Touch Me and Killer Clown singles plus unreleased demos from the bands never released, uncompleted second album a rare delight for fans of the bands impeccably slender back catalogue. Produced with friend and collaborator Nick Roughan (Skeptics), who Mulcahy had worked with on JPSEs The Size of Food, Tiger was tracked and mixed in Aucklands York Street Studios on Aucklands Shortland Street. The studio permits clarity in engineering; Andersons drums sound Albini-esque; guitars soar and chug, at times riding the knife edge of controlled chaos that Roughan has made his hallmark. From the grunge riffs of I Got It Clean to the soft melodic hooks of Bye Bye; from the slow, melancholic verses of Felo De Se to the overdriven anthemic rock drive of Saskatchewan, Tiger is unique in its deployment of binary functions; aesthetic and thematic. Quiet/loud; soft/hard; smooth/jagged. As Big Ross notes of the bands name itself, its big/small. Super-ette.