It must be frustrating for New Zealand musicians outside Auckland to watch the number of chump-ass bands come and go from the country’s largest city. Adding so very little and taking so much, they receive bucket loads of hype before fading into obscurity after one dreadful single.Rangiora’s favourite sons Transistors have been writing and recording music together long before they were told it was time to leave high school and move to the big smoke that is Christchurch; New Zealand’s South Island big smoke.While the aforementioned bands were swapping members to strike the new hot thang in Auckland town, Transistors have been beavering away on their third album as well as a forthcoming five-song EP Cuppa Jarra Brossa.Due early next month through Melted Ice Cream, the EP was recorded straight to four-track by Joe Sampson in the idyllic location of an isolated bach in North Canterbury. "Confidence Man" emerged as part of a Melted Ice Cream Cassingle series earlier this year, but is now available for free download from The Transistors' Bandcamp page.Check out the video below, as well as a few questions we asked drummer Olly Crawford-Ellis.Suck it, Auckland.Noisey: The hook of "Confidence Man" goes "You need to listen to yourself, coz it's too late for you to be somebody else…You've got them eating from the palm of your hand, but you're losing them with confidence, man". Who is that about?
Olly Crawford-Ellis: This song isn't about one individual. It's about hollow notions of what it is to be authentic and the drivel that many people seem to accept as being honest when it comes to music and performance. Don't get us wrong though, we're not averse to a bit of drivel, it just gets frustrating watching some drip from Auckland singing about his 'roots' in an American accent.A lot of elements of the video are those of your typical 90s throwback punk vid except for the puppet in the foreground.
The video depicts our bass player Colin's journey from puppet to becoming a real little boy. Something that the punters might not be aware of though, is that the puppet actually filmed the whole video himself."Confidence Man" is from the forthcoming EP Cuppa Jarra Brossa, but rumour has it that you have over 200 songs recorded for a forthcoming album.
You may have caught us out on a bit of marketing-speak here. When we say 200 songs written, we mean around 40 actually written. It's common in the marketing world to make up lies to sound impressive.
We write lots of songs all the time though. Every practice we have we come up with one or two songs but many, if not most of them, don't stand up to a lot of scrutiny. So by the time we have jettisoned these flimsier tracks and stolen the best bits from them for some better ones, we will probably only have about 40 songs for the record. This seems like a manageable number to us.'Cuppa Jarra Brossa' is available Sept 11.
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Olly Crawford-Ellis: This song isn't about one individual. It's about hollow notions of what it is to be authentic and the drivel that many people seem to accept as being honest when it comes to music and performance. Don't get us wrong though, we're not averse to a bit of drivel, it just gets frustrating watching some drip from Auckland singing about his 'roots' in an American accent.A lot of elements of the video are those of your typical 90s throwback punk vid except for the puppet in the foreground.
The video depicts our bass player Colin's journey from puppet to becoming a real little boy. Something that the punters might not be aware of though, is that the puppet actually filmed the whole video himself."Confidence Man" is from the forthcoming EP Cuppa Jarra Brossa, but rumour has it that you have over 200 songs recorded for a forthcoming album.
You may have caught us out on a bit of marketing-speak here. When we say 200 songs written, we mean around 40 actually written. It's common in the marketing world to make up lies to sound impressive.
We write lots of songs all the time though. Every practice we have we come up with one or two songs but many, if not most of them, don't stand up to a lot of scrutiny. So by the time we have jettisoned these flimsier tracks and stolen the best bits from them for some better ones, we will probably only have about 40 songs for the record. This seems like a manageable number to us.'Cuppa Jarra Brossa' is available Sept 11.