Phthursday Musings: Bailter Phthursday

Word came down today of the passing of Brent McLachlan, drummer for Bailter Space, after a lengthy illness. Brent and Alister and John were one of the truly great bands of our times, high in my personal pantheon, and, well, completely obscure to almost American who wasn’t similarly in college radio in the mid-90s.

They were all in The Gordons before Bailter Space and as such they are super old-school Kiwi rockers dating all the way back to 1980. Really Bailter Space and the Gordons are the same band… when the Gordons originally split, Alister and John recruited Hamish Kilgour to drum and that was Nelsh Bailter Space, but when Hamish departed and Brent came back into the fold, they became simply Bailter Space. (Also stylized as Bailterspace and that’s how you’ll find them on Bandcamp.)

I’ll be honest up front that I don’t have a lot of anecdotes about the individual members of the band. They were always kind of a mystery to me, even when I met them. (Foreshadowing!) Brent’s passing is a bummer though. This guy made some beautiful noise with his bandmates and I’ll give most of musings this week to this very underappreciated and overlooked band.

Bailter Space at their height were the oddest mixture of rich melody and heavy noise. It was as though nobody had ever explained to anyone in New Zealand how loud a band was actually supposed to be. The easiest shorthand I have is to call them “space rock” but there’s fuzz pop, postpunk, shoegaze, and a lot of other things going on that seem like they could only have congealed at the farthest edge of the world.

After getting to college and getting way into Pavement and finding myself in general attracted to whatever indie rock was, I’d often wind up buying CDs I’d come across simply because Matador Records put them out. This is how I wound up with Silkworm’s Firewater (which I’ve noted in the past) and also how I wound up with odder things like Circle X’s Celestial and The Fall’s Why Are People Grudgeful? EP.

And this is how I wound up with The Aim EP, which I found at a record store in Champaign, while there with my dad, in what must have been 1995. We were definitely there because that record store had a cat, and that cat was old and looked like Scottie, and Scottie was old and had been born in Champaign in 1983, and it was uncanny. But why on earth were my dad and I in Champaign in 1995? I have no idea. And why do I remember getting The Aim that day?

“The Aim” is one of those songs I could listen to a hundred times and keep hearing something new. It’s propulsive, abstract, loud, and I’ll be damned if I have any idea what it’s about. This is “The Aim” live in 2014:

Slowly I managed to piece together more Bailter Space CDs. I wound up with the B.E.I.P. EP. I wound up with Wammo. One day I’m talking about Bailter Space and my friend Raquello says, yeah but do you have Vortura? And then he held it aloft like a rare pouched mammal. But of course nobody else around us had any Bailter Space CDs. Nobody else around us ever would. One night down at the station my buddy RC (who I haven’t heard from in 28 years and gosh do I wonder what happened to that guy) made some comment about me playing things like “Bailtuh Space” and yeah, that’s kind of how it was.

Raquello and I actually saw Bailter Space in 1997 and of course it was in Champaign. We managed to get an interview with the band before hand, though, what the hell were we going to do with an interview with Bailter Space? They were very friendly, though they too must have wondered what the hell we were going to do with an interview. And Alister, well, Alister was VERY HIGH on something, something I’m pretty sure I’ve never been high on. We asked him to do a station ID for WESN and it was, well, it was something. Eight Eight Star One.

Then they played and they were of course great and there were like 42 people there and Raquello called out for them to play “X” and they were like, okay, we can do that. He’d never had that happen before and was dumbfounded it could actually work.

“X” is a perfect 90s noisy pop-rock song. It’s hard to find a better song on the planet that I could point to and say, this is what I like, but you’re going to find it too noisy. The noise is like aural hot sauce to me. Most people would find it grating. I find it calming, especially when there’s this melodic guitar line underneath.

One thing you can hear in both songs is that Brent is very cymbal-heavy. The guitars drone and the drums go high. It’s not unique, but it’s certainly unusual.

Summer of ‘97 I was down in the station office and we had been sent the 7” single for “Capsul” / “Argonaut”, two songs that were on the forthcoming album Capsul, but we didn’t know that because we often didn’t get clear information about things. I decided I wanted to cart “Argonaut”, by which I mean I wanted to record it to a cart, which was kind of like a re-recordable 8-track that we could put in the studio for DJs to play. But I wanted to know how long it was, so when I went to record it, I started the CD player with a song I knew to be a long song.

Well, even though I didn’t hear it, it turned out that the cart picked up both songs, and so I had managed to create an unexpected overlay of Bailter Space’s “Argonaut” and I’m pretty sure some Sonic Youth song, maybe from one of the SYR EPs that came out that year? And it was great, I liked it so much I put it out in the studio just like that. I will find this some day soon but my program logs are a mess and I’m not sure I recorded that summer all that well.

As a complete aside, in attempting to figure it out, I found my top ten albums of 2003:

1. Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Co.

2. Dirty Three, She Has No Strings Apollo

3. Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

4. Karl Hendricks Trio, The Jerks Win Again

5. Cat Power, You Are Free

6. Outkast, Speakerboxxx / The Love Below

7. Buzzcocks, Buzzcocks

8. Vic Chesnutt, Silver Lake

9. Lucero, That Much Further West

10. Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress

That might have been the last year I did a top ten. I actually think it aged pretty well and I think you’ll even see a couple of those show up in the META-FIFTY.

And that may seem like a wild tangent but for me it’s not because Bailter Space was one of those handful of bands which was so core to my college radio experience but then was like… just not very present afterwards. Solar.3 came out in 1999 but nobody knew it and they didn’t put out another album until 2012 and still nobody knew what was going on because marketing was very much not what Bailter Space was about. They were three anonymous dudes from Christchurch who moved to New York and they receded from view. Part of what made watching Flight of the Conchords so much fun when we finally got to it was that one of my favorite bands had sort of done exactly what Jemaine and Brett did on the show but possibly an even more extreme version.

The classic is of course the video for “Splat”, which you have to watch closely to pick up on everything gnineppah:

It’s rare that I can load up a video and think, this band is so goddamn loud, but you definitely get that from “Retro”, also from Wammo:

How big a deal was Bailter Space? They were such a big deal that Vortura hit #22 on the New Zealand charts and Wammo hit #23. The confusing thing is that Wammo’s chart placement is allegedly from 2021, which, well, I did always think they were decades ahead of their time…

Bailter Space was probably the first Kiwi band I got my hands on, though my dad inexplicably had a copy of the 3Ds’ Fish Tales / Swarthy Songs for Swabs so that’s probably the first one I heard. By 1997 I was so enamored with so much of what I’d heard that I was seeking out anything I could out of New Zealand. New Zealand is at the very top of my list of places in the world I want to visit.

When I get there, perhaps I will arrive in Christchurch and see this amazing thing, which I share with you as our Phthursday flag:

Now this was not exactly designed as a flag… it is an “armorial banner” of the city’s coat of arms. Whatever the hell it is, it’s a doozy. We’ve got the bishop’s mitre, we’ve got the wheat, and we’ve got a sheep that is clearly not alive, and four lymphads representing the boats which initially settled the city. I do not think this thing is actually flown very often because, you know, you don’t want to blind the people.

The Māori name for Christchurch is Ōtautahi. It is always good to remind that when we talk about the boats that settled the city that there were already people there. New Zealand is more advanced than most former colonies in, well, being honest about things, or at least that’s how I understand it.

“Bailter” isn’t a word, incidentally. I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean, much as I have no idea what most of these songs are about.

What I love about it all is how even when there’s so much abstraction, Bailter Space still offers hooks. The hooks feel almost accidental at times but that’s part of the charm.

“So La” from Capsul, this is just great stuff, whatever the hell it is:

So hey, when these awful temperatures go away, come hang out and we’ll listen to some Kiwi space rock together.