Album Review: Pining Radiata

Hailing from the Manawatū and the greater Te Whanganui rohe alt-rock quartet Pining Radiata are an emerging voice on the music scene worthy of some closer attention. Delivering a selection of brooding ethereal atmospheric dark folk, and contrastingly ragged fuzz‑laden, crunchy guitar moments their sound hovers in that unsettling space between goth, shoegaze, and intense slow‑burn indie-pop – a space I love to visit myself when I’m in search of some introspection.

The true beauty of their music is the delicate balance between Maeve Egan’s egg-shell delicate vocals and guitarist Michael McKeagg’s violent avant-garde noise sculptures. We first saw this heady brew bubble up on last year’s debut EP Skin. The EP’s embedded with swirling delay loops, pensive, hesitant lyricism, and sudden explosions of wild guitar wig-outs, most clearly marked on singles such as the gut-punch crescendos in Forget and the quiet-to-stormy heartbreaker, These Words, These Things. That release was but a mere teaser for what’s to come.

And so, over the early part of this year the band, Maeve Egan (vocals, guitar), Cass Dollery‑Signal (vocals, bass, keys), Michael McKeagg (guitar) and Josh Finegan (drums) were pulled back in to record again with Harry Lilley (who was the key man responsible for their EP) at The Stomach studio, Te Papaioea (Palmerston North) laying down the core tracks for their self-titled long player. Additional overdubs and finishing touches were completed at Fraser Williams’ house in Wellington and later mastered by Carl Saff.

The first single, and opener Not Awake is a two‑minute-plus blast of noise and intensity, carried through by a blitz of McKeagg’s fuzzed‑out guitar, showcasing the band’s louder, more urgent side. Yet, most of the album steers away from the shoegaze grunge agenda.

So Confused, which opens with haunting Blair Witch-esque bells and Egan’s bewildered vocal narrative is definitively unsettling. It’s those early morning moments when you find yourself on the couch or floor, dazed and hungover after a night of overindulgence. “Waking up and it’s dark / Don’t know where you are / Lipstick on your face / Don’t recognise this place / I’m so confused / Going back home / But there’s some funny people / Talking to me / I don’t know what they’re saying / I’m so confused / I’m so confused / Turn on the light / There’s someone lying in my bed”. Over her darkly befuddled lines, McKeagg and the band cloak the song in layers of disorientating distortion and yet more pedal fuzz. You can just imagine her staggering about, half comatose, staring intently through blurry eyes and nursing a Force-10 head-hurricane. If anything could better sum up this feeling, it’d be Camus Wyatt’s opaque, blurring image, from their Dream Garden series, which graces the album’s cover.

Taking it down a few notches, Egan’s vocals on Heard It All Before are delivered in a drawn out bone-dry infinite linear trajectory that emphasises the desperate fragility of the song as its protagonist struggles to find the right words to explain herself. A simple sentiment, impossible to explain satisfactorily: “I know you’ve heard it all before / But it’s never the right words”.

Angel is just a beautiful tribute to love. Jessica Kidd’s violin adds a spine-tingling and often shimmering element to the dark romance folk. It’s also a deceptively hooky number, and I found myself unconsciously humming along.

Like Angel, the next track Pulse is also deliciously blended with opaque layering and textural hazing. There’s an optimistic gothic quality in the sound, evoking classic 4AD acts such as Lush and Cocteau Twins.

The only song that seems incomplete is Heaven which feels more like a jam searching for direction – loose, exploratory, vocal lines that repeat almost incoherently. It appears to be unfinished.

Jessica Kidd’s violin returns to help out the closing piano piece, another simple, poignant, and quietly devastating folky love poem. Perhaps sad. Lonely. Gorgeous in its restraint. I was hearing a little snippet of a shanty, in the shadow of the Waterboys or The Pogues. A soft snare and guitar strum. And a million miles from the blast furnace of the album’s opener. A delicate closer, revealing the sensitive underbelly of this group. And another reason to be further impressed by their repertoire. I hope Pining Radiata make it to the capital one day, with what I’ve heard, I’ll be the first to buy a ticket. This debut offers a range of great material from the darkness to the light, at times shining through the undergrowth, stretching skyward, soaring high.