Peter Jefferies' Electricity

It’s always hard to figure why and when specific sounds wind up defining a place. For whatever reason, New Zealand, since the late ‘70s, has been a hotbed of low fidelity, weirdo recordings. The impact of Xpressway as well as Flying Nun is incalculable: everyone from Jay Reatard to Nirvana has at one time made mention of the remarkable stuff flying from that tiny island.

Independent of the punk and power pop that Australia cranked out – ie the Saints, Radio Birdman and the Scientists – New Zealand’s underground music expresses some longing sensation that’s absent from its brethren down under. It’s not better or worse, just different. The Pin Group and all of the Chris Knox affiliated ensembles are better known in the west than Peter Jefferies. That, however, isn’t due to his lack of output.

Beginning in the late ‘70s, Jefferies and his brother Graeme founded Nocturnal Projections and subsequently This Kind of Punishment. Each group gained a modicum of exposure State-side after reissue campaigns began. Regardless of that, the Jefferies didn’t ever hit it big (that’s relative).

Even as he’s recorded for the better part of thirty years Peter Jefferies has gone on to work in education – teaching kids drumming and the like. But while his straight, day job has no doubt served to enrich his life, Jefferies, as a solo artist, has gone in on more than five long players since the late ‘80s.

Still characterized by a reliance on archaic technology, Jefferies continues to record on whatever four track is laying around. Because of the wide and varied recording career that he’s amassed over time, it’s difficult to settle upon a single effort that’s either the most representative of his approach to music or even the most entertaining.

With that being said, Electricity is defiantly worth a few spins. On this 1994 Ajax Records released disc, there’s such a wide swath of influence, the music’s hard to pin down. Comprised of a spate of piano focused tracks, a few stand outs clearly deviate from the formula of keys and vocals.

The album opener, “Wined Up,” begins with Jefferies proclaiming, “Oh, Jimmy,” but then gets into a repetitious piano note and some serpentine guitar line. The affect is that the song arrives as some extension of the Velvet Underground’s catalog – only with a sort of down under twist. The track isn’t punky, but still retains an aggression that most piano based music can’t conjure.

The song’s an early highlight as the disc occasionally gets bogged down in weirdo piano ballads even as each is rendered in sincere terms. A reprieve is presented on “Snare” as the singer groans a few lines into the mic. Yeah, there’s still a piano figure that functions as the rhythm, but with enough production trickery, the experimental wash of sounds works out to good effect before Jefferies heads back to ballad country.

The entirety of Electricity is pretty erratic, but sports enough downer charm as to warrant a place in most geek’s record collections.