Album Review: Springloader - Just Like Yesterday (2024)

Well, this is a lovely surprise, and a bit of a trip. An album which started its journey as far back as 1994, finally springing to life in November 2024. 

As the old Mainland Cheese advert used to tell us … “good things take time”. 

Springloader was initially the shared vision of Failsafe Records guru, Rob Mayes (guitars, bass), and founding drummer Dave Toland. In late 1993, with the band still very much in its infancy, they were joined by Michael Oakley (vocals, guitars), and Che Rogers (bass). 

The fledgling album began its rather fragmented life with the earliest recordings in Christchurch in the summer and autumn of 1994. Thirty years on, with a fair bit of interim tweaking, the (not really) ironically titled Just Like Yesterday has finally been released. There was essentially a dry run of the album in 2005, a low key release called Just Like Falling, which featured demo tracks and “as is” recordings of many of the tunes that make up the fully formed album we see today. 

I’ve got to be honest: beyond the music of Supergroove, Strawpeople, and one of two other local acts, much of the first half of the 1990s is a giant vacant void for yours truly when it comes to music from Aotearoa. I do know that it was a highly productive period for the genre we call “New Zealand Music” but because I was based in the UK for much of that era, I missed a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t land on those then-faraway shores. There was no internet back then, kids, and I’ve more or less been playing catch-up ever since.

And I also know - beyond nascent electronica, hip hop, and perhaps a bit of “rave” - one of the most prominent or popular genres in the UK in 1994 was this thing we’ve come to call shoegaze, with bands like Ride, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, plus the even more niche likes of Boo Radleys and Swervedriver, all creating their own unique brands of driving guitar rock. Guitar rock that had an even more distinctive sound than the job-lots of US grunge being imported into the UK at that time. Mostly indie-driven - during an era when the Independent charts mattered more than the pop charts - it was a brand of rock that was fresh and melodic, and one which mostly relied upon its carefully crafted wall-of-sound aesthetic. When done well, especially in a live setting, it could be exhilarating. 

Which is pretty much where Springloader comes in. If the then abandoned album, had somehow - by dint of some miracle - managed to find the ear of one or two of the influential UK radio DJs back in 1994, it may well have been a very big deal. Because when I listen to the title track, which opens proceedings, I’m instantly transported back to the central Glasgow bedsit I occupied for most of that year, and the music on the radio shows I spent most evenings listening to. 

But more than any of that, there’s an experimental bent at play on Just Like Yesterday which might just give the album an important point of difference. Alternate tunings and unorthodox guitar techniques, with Mayes, perhaps better known as a bass player, clearly enjoying the creative freedom that every guitarist-at-heart craves. 

Something that, with the aid of no little post-millennium spit and polish, tends to give it, with accidental reverence to its very title, a degree of timelessness. And there’s a sense that Just Like Yesterday could just as easily have been made during any of the rock n roll eras, bar perhaps, the very first one. 

‘Just Like Yesterday’ (the track) really is the perfect title track and advance single. An almost Byrdsian indie power-pop gem, it also offers us an early taster of one or two of the more unorthodox guitar settings that then go on to proliferate the rest of the album. 

There’s a good balance of higher tempo tracks (‘Nothing I Want More’, ‘Looking Out For You’) and more introspective slower tunes (‘Closer To Further Away’, ‘All That I Want’) before the album builds to a couple of dense near mini-epics in the form of ‘One More Thing’ and ‘Too Close’, nearer the end. 

At ten tracks, clocking in at around 45 minutes, Just Like Yesterday feels a bit more than the mere sum of its parts. Whatever else it might be, for me, it is already working as a stylistic reference point to a particular time and place. Which is never a bad thing to be. And yet, yet … as alluded to above, it’s not really that at all. 

It’s an album that comes complete with its very own very-rock n roll backstory. A story that has taken some 30 years to be told. A story told in quite some detail in the extensive sleeve notes that come with the release. The story of a previously lost album finally being found. 

The sleeve notes also offer a lot of other stuff - lyrics and chords - that for the most part can be filed away in the drawer labelled: Unrepentant Guitar Nerd Stuff. 

(Everyone has a drawer with that label, right?) 

And bonus upon bonus, if the accompanying press release is to be believed, there’s already a follow-up album locked and loaded to go for Springloader in 2025. 

Check it out the Springloader Bandcamp page (here).

Up The Punks ...

Punk's Not Dead at an exhibition of music's greatest genre …

The crowd was as mixed as the exhibition itself. Young punks, old punks, baby punks, goths, emos, and people like myself way too boring to attract a label, mingled at Wellington's Thistle Hall for the opening night of a display of vast amounts of ephemera going back to the far-off days of punk rock's heyday.

Up The Punks is a celebration of the capital's punk scene going back to 1977. Plastered all over the tiny venue's walls were gig posters, photographs, newspaper articles, zine covers and what-have-yous. Curated by John Lake and reliant on contributions from a number of people among them Skippy (aka Jim Gardener), it's a showcase for a semi-underground scene that's surviving in the third decade of this putrid century.

Up The Punks is on from October 22 to October 27 at the Thistle Hall on Cuba Street in Wellington.

(Another forgotten) Classic Album Review: Five Thirty – Bed (1991)

Craig Stephen digs deep to come up with another should-have-been but never-quite-got-there classic album from the vast vaults of the early 1990s shoegaze scene …

In the days when British television made music shows that mattered, there was a one-off series that stood out because it unveiled some emerging and exciting acts.

I had long forgotten the programme’s title, but Mr Google informs me it was called the Yamaha Band Explosion, and that it was filmed at the Marquee Club in London.

The nauseating yet enthusiastic DJ Gary Crowley introduced a variety of shoegazing bands who looked aloof and immersed themselves in wah-wah effects. This contrasted with a very young and electrifying Manic Street Preachers and an act that, sadly, has disappeared off the historical radar, 5:30 (also written as Five Thirty).

Timing was cruel to 5:30 who were in the right place, at the wrong time. In 1991, the world had a choice between the Madchester / indie-dance bands, shoegazers, techno geeks and the grunge noiseniks from America. It was impossible to market a band decked in shirts from Carnaby Street, and possessed a sound that didn’t really fit into any of the above scenes.

 Their sole album, Bed, which was released a week before Nevermind, is a classic of the era, and I was delighted when 3 Loop Music re-released it a few eclipses ago with a welter of extra tracks. Indeed, there were two discs of B-sides, a John Peel session, and demos of songs that would have made up the second album.

It includes ‘Supernova’, the burning pop single with heavy tremolo-effected guitars that should have gone higher in the charts, while ‘13th Disciple’ was tuneful, assertive and owed a small debt to the Stone Roses. ‘Junk Male’ used some clever guitar techniques with a stunning opening stanza: “If God were to ever come my way, I’d spit into his face. Then calmly walk away.”

‘Songs and Paintings’ was about how creativity couldn’t change the world: “Songs and paintings never brought a regime down. It cannot be fair.”

Bed was surprisingly diverse, ranging from funk-infused numbers to slow burners to guitar-driven belters, sometimes beefed up with the use of wah-wah pedals.

While their recording output was tragically brief, the band was in existence for seven years, forming in 1985 in Oxford while Tara Milton and Paul Bassett were still at school. Despite their youth, they released a cracking EP (as 5:30!) that same year. It was headed by ‘Catcher in The Rye’, which was brimming with youthful cockiness and possessed the headstrong maturity of a more seasoned group.

What happened thereafter is somewhat mysterious as they disappeared for four years. They then reappeared in 1989 in London - having dropped the exclamation mark - and had been joined by Phil Hopper on drums. Soon after they signed to East West, in the days when real talent could get you noticed by big to middling labels.

The following year came the long-awaited second single, ‘Abstain’, which sounded like late-period Jam and The Clash rolled into one. Later, in the year of ‘Fool’s Gold’, ‘Step On’ and ‘Sit Down’, came the edgy guitar-driven ‘Air-Conditioned Nightmare’. Not quite as good perhaps as ‘Abstain’ but still way ahead of many other, more successful but more limited, British bands. Neither single was deemed suitable for Bed.

These singles set them up for a big 1991 and they were on fire during the year. ‘13th Disciple’ was released as a single in May, ‘Supernova’ in July, Bed in September, and the You EP in November. Every single was a stunner, and the album was packed full of them. However, the singles reached No.67, 75, and 72 respectively in the UK. Not surprisingly with such low sales numbers, Bed never stood a chance. The radio DJs, the music journalists and the TV producers were nowhere to be seen when they were needed most.

The almost vilified Northside had more success FFS.

Alas, 5:30 split up in 1992, a second album not progressing beyond the demo stage. Hindsight might proffer that, had they been more aware of how the tide surges and subsides, they could’ve been contenders. But you can understand why they packed it in. Pop music is a fickle industry indeed.

Tara Milton subsequently formed The Nubiles which had one decent album, the slightly left-field Mindbender, and later had a solo career. Paul Bassett was part of Orange Deluxe which released a string of albums, while Phil Hopper left the music industry altogether.

My vinyl copy of Bed is much played, and the triple disc version of Bed is getting its turn when the time allows. I only wish many more people and their pets could say the same thing.