Vorn

Powertool Records - new release. PT109: VORN - Down For It. Relax. The album of the year has arrived.

In 1999, when The Feelers were busy sweeping the field at the all-new New Zealand Music Awards, Vorn was locked in a filthy lounge in Hamilton, chained to a borrowed four-track tape machine, recording a debut album that would be hailed as a classic by the select few who got to hear it. Described by Chris Knox as "a great, grinding grandpappy of an album", Normal the Normal Normal announced the arrival of that rarest of things in any nation's music scene: a New Voice.

Twelve years on, The Feelers have returned to their roots as a covers band servicing drunken rugby crowds, and the Vorn canon has swollen to six albums, running the gamut from the fractured bedroom lo-fi song cycle Thunk (2006) to the Spector-on-a-shoestring concept-album-à-clef Modern Classics (2009). And now, Down For It. The album of the year 2011.

Let's not kid ourselves: this album is not going to win any New Zealand Music Awards. New Zealand on Air will not fall over itself to fund a bunch of austerity-measure-defying videos. Mainstream radio will treat this album in much the same way that 17th Century England treated the bubonic plague. But truly great albums have time on their side. When The Naked and Famous are both fully clothed and utterly obscure, when the only place you can find an Opshop record is in an op shop, people who love music will be talking about this record. And you are among the very first people to hear it.

Down For It, like any Vorn album, incorporates and twists genres with the wanton glee we all feel when we first discover that Rules Were Made To Be Broken. Like any Vorn album, we soon realise that we are in the presence of the best lyricist operating in New Zealand today. What's new is the sheer buzz of spending forty five minutes in the company of an artist who is in world-beating form and knows it.

Here are twelve songs which differ wildly in style and form, each instantly accessible in its own right, each linked to the other by a web of musical and lyrical themes that reveals itself with repeated listenings. Here are twelve hit singles that will never be hits, brought together as pieces of a whole work that manages to be more than the sum of its parts.

Here is the definition of a classic pop album. You are hereby given the chance to be part of a phenomenon, right at its very beginning. If you miss your chance, there's no need to worry. Truly great albums have time on their side.

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