Rock music, it’s inherently funny, Bunchy’s Big Score frontman Max White says.
"It’s a genre that’s made to have fun with."
But unfortunately, over time people have lost sight of that quality.
White and his bandmates have assembled around a tall table at a Dunedin cafe, ostensibly to discuss the serious business of releasing new music into the world.
Which is indeed where the conversation started — traversing the road travelled to this point. But, consistent with their reputation for subversion, the four musicians veer readily down absurdist byways in support of White’s contention.
Indeed, bassist Niki Knight offers a history of rock to help put the argument beyond question.
"It’s descended from a bunch of people who were just talking about how horny they were," she says.
And we’re off.
Take classic rock, for example, White says, sounding like he’s thought long and hard about this.
"It’s just completely overblown. And that’s good, you know, that’s fun."
He breaks out a very serviceable approximation of Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, a song originally performed only after hours under a blow dryer and in a flying harness.
We’ve arrived deep in Bunchy territory, where one minute it’ll be their own inclusively alternative art rock, the next . . .
"We notoriously try to pull out as many covers as we can," guitarist Jack Ingram confirms of their live gigs. "Like, we always play it terribly on purpose."
"I remember a girl came up to us after one of our gigs and she was like, you guys were so stupid, it was awesome," drummer Reef Brazendale recalls.
"We’ve been doing Feel Like Makin’ Love, by Bad Company, for, like, two years now and it’s still funny."
"You play it until it falls apart, right?" Knight adds.
The four of them pile in over the top of each other with stories of their live gig detours, describing an unhinged playground experience — before White identifies the irony of it.
"Which, like, just goes completely against everything that we did on the album. We were so disciplined," he says.
That discipline and the focus that clearly accompanied it is captured across the 11 tracks of Bunchy’s Big Score’s second album, Wanda’s Bicycle, which is out on Friday.
Recorded by Nick Roughan at Southlink Studios — a significant step up in production from the band’s first effort, Happy Birthday, Daniel Johnston!!! Don’t Be Afraid . . . 3 — Wanda’s Bicycle combines the collective talents of the band’s musicians in the service of a poppier new direction.
It’s more of a proper collaborative band effort, White, the band’s principal songwriter, says.
"Everyone wrote their own parts and such. And, yeah, it’s been really different doing it that way."
Album number one was essentially White, then guitarist Hamish Waddell and Brazendale, at home, making it up as they went along.
"I like to listen to music where the band kind of changes every time, like does something completely different," White says. "And I’d like to think that we did that this time by changing the approach and recording in a proper studio as well."
White reaches for an exemplar and comes up with another classic rock radio regular — Neil Young.
"You know, he’ll have albums where you can tell that he’s sort of worked on it by himself. And then for another album he’ll get a band together. And then you can really see that there’s a huge difference between album one and album two."
It seems to be working for the Big Score. Early singles from Wanda’s Bicycle have already made a splash, sing-along earworm You Are A Camera still top-three in Radio One’s Top-11 a month in, after time at No.1.
A good many of the album’s tracks were well gig-tested, but they still rehearsed intensely before going into the studio, White says.
"This time it’s like, all right, the guitar does this at two minutes and forty seconds and then the bass does this at X part."
Perhaps concerned this might sound a little too earnest, Knight shares a slightly different recall: "Don’t speak for me. I was making that s*** up".
For all that they’ve done things differently for the second album, there is still connective tissue here.
Original member Hamish Waddell — now off on solo projects — both mixed and mastered the new album and lends his vocals to another of the early singles, Oscar Says, a Velvet Underground meets The Pixies soft-loud rumination.
Also carrying over, Bunchy’s Big Score still proudly own the identifier art rock, but if the "huge difference" White describes for Wanda’s Bicycle is accurate, then the poppier sheen they’ve added accounts for a good bit of it.
Knight says she describes their oeuvre as "noise pop" to her non-musician friends.
"On the last album, there was a lot of seven-minute songs and stuff. And this one is, like, three-minute pop songs."
It will be their Nevermind, he says, slyly — standby for In Utero.
"No-one has the attention span for seven-minute songs anymore," Knight observes.
So, they’re playing to their generation, "the TikTok generation", White manages, before the band dissolves into laughter again.
Truth be told, the slide guitar-inflected soulful diary revelation Old Iron stays a little longer, stretching out to five minutes, but it’s a story well told so maybe their peers will hang on to the end.
While they continue to plough their own idiosyncratic furrow, Brazendale says the band’s poppy turn is not out of step with the wider Dunedin scene, which, while continuing its experiments in sound, is elevating the catchy.
There’s a "gesture" towards poppier songs in the scene at the moment, he says.
"It seems like the songs are kind of erring towards three, four minutes, verse-chorus, which wasn’t always the way in Dunedin."
And that’s harder than people think, White says, to write a decent good chorus.
"I think we were trying to do that last time, but the nature of the album was that it was really, like, lo-fi. And, yeah, sort of homemade. And so I think lots of the stuff that might have had a chance of being a catchy or the accessible element was buried underneath the noisiness."
It transpires that Roughan, at Southlink, recognised what was going on in the studio — even suggesting a way to underline the aesthetic.
"So, Nick was recording with us, and then there was a point where he was like, ‘oh my god, these songs sound like a Bob Scott song’," White recounts.
"And we were like, ‘oh, cool’."
Next minute, Roughan had roped Scott in to do backing vocals.
"We’re all pretty big fans of The Clean and The Bats," White admits.
Their music is a byword for strong choruses, he says, Chorus 101 — their pop sensibilities hiding out beneath the thinnest veil of lo-fi scappiness.
White is also happy to induct The Clean’s back catalogue into the art rock club — art rock being about drawing on and incorporating elements from outside the rock tradition, he says.
"I guess, maybe going back to the Velvet Underground, who are one of the quintessential art rock bands, like, the initial purpose of the band was to combine music with visuals, film and art and such."
The Clean have that curated visual presence too, he says.
"I think that most successful art is combining something, like, really familiar to people with something that’s kind of subversive or discomforting, you know, which can be that scrappiness."
If Bunchy’s Big Score evokes the Dunedin Sound in other ways, it’s their dedication to the allied virtues of loud and noisy.
But as a consciously positive expression, Brazendale says.
"Yeah, like happy noise, I suppose. You know?" White adds — like The Clean.
"Tally Ho. That’s a happy noise song," Brazendale suggests, maybe serious this time.
Anyway, Bunchy’s Big Score are taking all of this artful, inclusively alternative, scrappy, well rehearsed, tight-loose, loud-soft, subversively funny, power-chorus fuelled energy on the road to promote Wanda’s Bicycle this month and next.
Ōtepoti is first, on Friday, followed by Ōtautahi, then it’s off to Te Ika-a-Māui — the North Island for the first time. There’s trepidation about crossing the strait.
Will the northerners respond to their left-field tendencies?
They get a couple of shots at it in Auckland, one all-ages the other at Whammy. And Brazendale says a friend there has been posting about the gigs, promoting them as a chance to see something different — because Tāmaki has nothing like them.
Wellington too is an uncertain prospect. When we talked, the band hadn’t managed to find a support act from Wellington’s seriously self-regarding and apparently risk-averse musicians.
"I feel like we might be one of those bands that people don’t know what to think of until they’ve seen us," Brazendale says. "And then they’re like, ‘OK, I get it now’."
And if a gig is not going so well, there’s a Bunchy’s Big Score solution for that anyway. They can just pull out their cover of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades.
The music
Bunchy’s Big Score release Wanda’s Bicycle on Friday, then play South Island release gigs:
• Ōtepoti Dunedin, Yours Friday June 19
• Ōtautahi Christchurch, Darkroom Saturday June 20
