The Puddle - The Shakespeare Monkey

Abridged first-time vinyl pressing of Flying Nun alumni The Puddle's sixth album, first released in 2009 during the second phase of the band's existence following a fairly sustained hiatus throughout the 90s and early 00s. Formed in 1983 and led by George Henderson, a Bill Direen-like character with a penchant for eccentric psych-pop miniatures that derive inspiration from the sacred and profane in equal measure, there's an unmistakably Aoetorean quality to The Puddle, a band that really couldn't have been from anywhere else in the world even as they reference The Beatles, The Kinks, Syd Barrett, even Vic Godard. That's the way they do it down there! Like with a lot of his celebrated contemporaries - say Robert Scott, Hamish Kilgour, Peter Jefferies, the aforementioned Bill Direen - Henderson's songwriting ages well, even if there is a tendency to favour the records afixed with a Flying Nun logo. In doing so, you'd be missing out on some lowkey, homespun gems here (just as elsewhere in the catalogue), erudite earworms that explore the minutiae of love and the confusion of existence in ways that make such big ideas seem as easy as passing thoughts. That's not just a calling card for the New Zealand underground, but a quality existent in all great pop writing. It's just that the world down that way seems to spin out a certain type of undeniable song, and The Shakespeare Monkey is its own kind of proof of that kind of life. 
 
FFO: Bilders, The Clean, Vic Godard, Ray Davies, Electric Blood