Hamlet

Description

Two albums in, with the link between each moment of slurring spoken word, piano ballad, and dischordant fuck you song becoming less and less clear, we all ought to be asking how, in 2016, Dunedin is still spewing out bands as strange as Opposite Sex. Is it all the native psilocybin? The isolation? The musical legacy?

Strange feelings come out in strange ways, as tends to happen in a city of misera- ble winter, depression, and a uni populace crawling with the sorts of fucking jocks about whom the songs basically write themselves. Lucy, in Supermarket: Make me cute, make me sweet, make me fragile and petite / So I can be pushed around by some dickhead who likes rugby, beer and meat. Swipe right. Tims standout moment, Tasmans Puke, spells out in no polite terms his take on NZs colonial past. And with Reggies voice drifting away with his guitar in Regicide, it makes it abundantly clear that Opposite Sex have as many ways to do songs as they have songs.

Thats because, in spite of the patented sound of their city, the real Dunedin influence on Opposite Sex is an ideology. Theres punk, of course, as usual, but the bizarro lens of Xpressway the Dunedin label what with its Marxist dues and DIY purism, is the bands heftiest inheritance thanks to how many of their peers come from this older, noisy school. It only helped their underground repu- tation that certain big-name ex-members of the Fall and the Pastels wound up being big fans of this obscure New Zealand band.

Whichever way you have em Opposite Sex have already left a permanent impres- sion within todays younger underground generation. Besides that one fact, there arent many unifying features of a band so scattered, but so brilliantly chaotic, and by no means confused. But thats just what you get from a band with so much uncontrollable inspiration, with imagination thats like not unlike mashing ones hands against the keyboard of existence and expecting Shakespeare to come out. Judging by HAMLET, its just funny when it sort of does.