Opposites attract . . .

EVEN a low-fi, low-profile kind of guy like Tim Player can’t help but get a ghost of a smirk when he learns he’s been compared with Australian art-punk icon Nick Cave.
“Make my year, why don’t you UK reviewer,” he says of the album review penned by a British critic.
And, yes, he was still smirking.
It’s a relaxed end to an intense year for vocalist/drummer Player and his bandmates Lucy Hunter (vocals/bass/trumpet/keys) and Fergus Taylor (guitar), who together form the quirky, chaotic ensemble Opposite Sex.
Between them, they’ve been all over the place, Player and Hunter earlier this year moving from Gisborne to Dunedin where they work, study and make art. Meanwhile, Taylor headed off to Hamilton to further his own education, meaning two-thirds of the band was separated from the other third by a distance of nearly 1000 kilometres.
They did manage to get together often enough, however, to spend a frenzied eight hours recording the debut, self-titled album that — in all its “scuzzy, ramshackle charm” — was last month released by Dunedin’s Fishrider Records on both CD and vinyl. And Taylor again made his way South to play a few album release gigs, though Player and Hunter make do by performing as a duo when the guitarist is not there.
That “totally works”, says Player of the sometimes abrasive percussion of the duo’s sound, his “bark and shout” contrasting with Hunter’s more conventional (though still quirky) vocal.
“People do like the rawness of the two-piece but when Fergus is there he turns it into a different dynamic . . . there is a lot more depth as opposed to this kind of percussive overload,” Player adds.
“I guess the trio is just a bit more delicate . . . a bit more like what people might expect from a band.”
To date, tracks from the new album have had airplay on stations from New York to Dunedin and, apart from a drubbing by one Kiwi critic, reviews have generally being positive, it declared to be everything from “a perplexing, disarming but ultimately fascinating listen” (thecorner.co.nz) to “an absurdist-logico mix of euro pop, beat poetry, and subterranean lo-fi adventuring” (Rough Trade Records).
And there is more to come. During one of Taylor’s trips to Dunedin the trio sequestered themselves in the long, narrow, windowless concrete basement that serves as their practice space and manipulated the “amazing” natural acoustics while recording a bunch of brand new songs.
They’re something new, Player says, “a bit slower in tempo, a bit more sonic, a bit more ambient”.
He was not sure whether those new songs — mostly penned by the prodigiously talented Hunter — would eventually be released on a full-length album, but they probably won’t. His interest in the visual arts (his conceptual sculpture studies at Dunedin School of Art are, by all accounts, earning him fans in a different genre) has him thinking about doing things in a different way. Perhaps, he says, they might get small runs of lathe-cut polycarbonate albums done at an artisan plant in Geraldine, meaning they can create individual, hand-made sleeves for each and every one.
But that’s all in the future. In the meantime, with all players back in town, Opposite Sex will play as a trio when it performs its hometown album release gig at the Poverty Bay Club on Christmas Eve.
“We’re all really, really excited about coming back, playing to old friends and showing them what we’ve been up to.”