CD: Nuggety by Left Or Right

Nuggety by Left Or Right

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Invercargill men Left Or Right have grown a rare and beautiful thing: an original genre-bending album that blurs boundaries, distils the band's essence, flexes with muscular live energy and defies classification.

Check out Nuggety on iTunes, where the extremely proactive and progressive trio have their album available. The album genre is listed as "unclassifiable". (It sits nicely in its own space between Led Zeppelin and Letters To Cleo in my iTunes library.)

Just five tracks but a respectable 35-ish minutes long, Nuggety satisfies abundantly because of the quality of its performance, which is exceptional, and its fluid shifts in tempo and style. Hold on tight, this is quite a ride: not for the fainthearted or the conservative.

Old school hard rock morphs into 70s and 80s reggae and ska and lush contemporary Pasifika. All the while Callum Hampton, Metua Marama and Steve Marshall sing every line like their lives depend on it. They hold nothing back vocally, and it's so refreshing to hear the tuneful roar of great voices united in raw, pitch-perfect harmony.

The songs' complex construction demands that they be listened to in their entirety.

Left Or Right's bottom-line default sound is rootsy dub, but they sound nothing like, say dDub, whose tunes are pop based. If dDub are the Beatles of New Zealand dub, then Left Or Right are the Cream, equally capable of exquisite subtlety and extreme primal heaviness, on the turn of a dime.

Hitchy crashes through a Black Sabbath-like rock breakout. Park Street has a free-form jazz passage featuring the very capable Hampton on trumpet. Right For Me has a gritty, dirty 70s-brewed funk bassline. Sugar, the only song weighing in under four minutes, is the record's sole nod to commerciality. Sleep brings out the blues.

Adding to the live energy of the recording is a subliminal rattle and hum of buzzing amps and studio noise. The band has been careful to leave nature as she lies, without sterile sonic polishing. It adds volumes to the album's big, fresh, in-your-face sound and enhances Left Or Right's unique mashup of cool musical styles.

Nuggety is a world-class album that will be noticed. This is where the magic begins.

- © Fairfax NZ News