Te Huhu

I love an album that’s all about atmosphere. From the first notes, Auckland’s Te Huhu waft into the room on a plume of fog and curl their sound around the ceiling fans. Putting wind in the ‘90s and early ’00’s psychedelic sails, the South-hemi smoke slingers pick up the yoke of slow motion merchants from Spiritualized and the short-lived Lupine Howl, to Spacemen 3 and Brian Jonestown at their most mystic. The band thrives in extended grooves, pushing the vocals under waves of molasses and mercury. Languid, liquid guitars populate the first side of the album, and by the time the listener washes ashore “On Holiday,” there’s a kind of shipwrecked, half-hallucinated feeling that seeps into the mix. The album skews towards a kind of psychedelic oblivion that sucks the listener in like a sonic black hole.

The band’s headphone quicksand comes doused in enough dopamine to make the slip into the void feel just fine, though. “Tūrangawaewae” borrows the cavernous guitar echoes of Moon Duo and lets them slip south toward the “Planet Caravan” cadence of “Jesus Is Passing Through.” The former’s not the only time that a kinship with the works of Ripley Johnson shows up as “All In My Head” feels like it may have found a home on the first Rose City Band album. Like Johnson Te Huhu thrives on a tapestry of slow strums with an engine of longing. Throw in a veneer of heat-warped amp fry and this record comes slithering towards my wheelhouse. The band steers Deelishis Herbs on a raft of vibrations, lacquering the listener to the floor for a good forty minutes. The world’s calling out for a narcotic respite these days and this one’s ticking all the boxes.

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