I've been in love with Slowboat for years. Back when I found Slowboat there were more indie record shops in Wgtn, another 2nd hand store (just up from Slowboat), the one in Cuba Mall where I used to get all my Queen vinyl and found a vinyl copy of Marillion's Afraid of Sunlight . Which is my favourite album. It's perfect. And then there was Alan's (later to be SmokeCDs) in the AA Centre. Ahhh good times.
But most of these disappeared, leaving Slowboat alone to carry the Indie flag for Wellington. So that's where I do most of my CD and vinyl shopping.
So when Slowboat announced that Sam Scott from Phoenix was going to be doing an instore appearance for Record Day it was a no-brainer whether I'd go or not. Sam has a new album coming out on Wednesday called Straight Answer Machine on Loop Records. The gig was interesting with Sam and Ponies only playing stuff from the new album without (as the band said) much practice. The gig was loose, rough and wonderful. The new stuff has, on first listen, strong rockabilly influences, some lyrics were Dylanesque, elements of alt-pop (if indeed that's a genre) - sounds promising. Thanks to a delivery issues there weren't any CDs to purchase, sorry Neil!! but it'll be in the mail on Wednesday afternoon. Very relaxed gig and the lack of practice showed but it tightened up during the gig, it was similar to Phoenix gigs of a few years ago where excitement often consisted of who would finish together and what key they'd be playing in (awesome gigs tho' loved them!).
Good turn out of impassioned music fans, hopefully a sign that Slowboat will continue to do well.
Now beer: having a 10 minutes to fill in, I wandered into Rumbles wine sales to have a look at their beer and whisky. Whisky selection was reasonable, but the beer was interesting - different from Regional Wines (my local indie booze shop), I found Milestone Brewery "Dark Galleon". The rum overtones are quite prominent in the nose, as are the choc dark malt. Taste: a bit weak, choc dark malt taste is strong, but the body is weakish, more typical of an ale than a dark beer - although it is a dark bitter rather than a stout - so you wouldn't expect it to be too heavy. It's reasonable high alcohol (5.4%) for a bitter, but this isn't obvious in the taste - it tastes more like a standard British ale. It's quite drinkable, and I'll certainly try and find some on tap. Cost (in NZ) was $8.50 which is steep for a beer (admittedly 500ml) and if you have no standards bottles of wine (at 12%) can be found for less. Using that as a comparison, the beer looks much much better. I would drink again, but I'm not blown away by this one. I will try to get others from this brewery tho'. Their list on the website looks interesting.
Love, B
2 comments:
Glad to hear Slowboat still gets the support it needs. They certainly got the bulk of my CD collection when I left. One of the nice things about NZ, actually, is the fact that new stuff like albums, books and so on are so bloody expensive that there is room for a good second-hand market.
One of the other stores you mentioned was Silvio's, always a must-visit when I was a Paraparaumu-bound teenager visiting Wellington. The best thing about them was that they had all the cool music and movie posters. Got a few Floyd posters there in my day. Went out of business sometime in the late nineties I believe. I think Real Groovy coming along put the final boot into them.
Gah, thought this was last week... Oh well.
Slowboat does seem nicest of the surviving record shops, but still only stocks about 5% of the music I'm most interested in buying...
Sam said pre-his first album he was looking to use his solo stuff as a vehicle for looseness, that some of his favourite albums are terribly played but capture a certain spirit because of it... Bring it on I say!
I guess Tonefloat's named after Organisation's (pre-Kraftwerk-Kraftwerk) album! Rad.
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