Little Skull - A Wayside Shrine

Ever get that feeling you're living in the wrong hemisphere? Here's a new Little Skull record, Dean Brown's sixth under that name, probably (since this is where he now resides, having first started out in Wellington two decades back) made in London and released by a west coast label, sounding inescapably very much like it came from nowhere but New Zealand. Brown's music has long made gestures to the NZ underground continuum, a gently evolving, subtle recalibration of its central tenets of drone, noise and folk aesthetics, though frequently less concerned with the more gnarled approaches of its most famous sons. Little Skull prefers the whisper to the scream and on A Wayside Shrine seems to be more at peace than ever, two long form suites of dusty, twilit hour ruminations broadcast from the backrooms of a solitary mind. The accompanying press release uses phrases like 'geological drone', 'Satie-like' and, yes, 'cinematic scope', all entirely valid, though for me this feels closer to an elemental divination of cultural heritage assembled into a very personal vision. A New Zealand folk music, no two ways about it, regardless of whatever side of the world it finds itself on.