...‘Seed’ is an intriguing track, ostensibly a song about getting ideas in your head. Its author grins at the thought. “It’s about stuff you know you shouldn’t be doing but you just keep doing it anyway. C’mon, what’s life if you’re not a bit naughty … I bet people who aren’t naughty, if they get to the end of their days, they probably think ‘I wish I was naughtier!’”
Pro Tools proved a beneficial but frustrating tool. “When we did I Believe You Are A Star with Pro Tools, I didn’t know you could shift [it] around block by block, bar by bar, so I actually shifted everything around on that record by ear … I had to sit there and nudge everything by a tenth of a second, so everything on that record is a wee bit out of time.”...
...During recording sessions, a different shift happened: Carter parted with Flying Nun. “Flying Nun had become just another record company … and it was just the same old record company shit, to be honest,” he explains frankly. “It was time to move on … to their credit, they had financed the failed recording of the album.”
Carter met Malcolm Black, the A&R staffer at Sony in a record store a couple of years later, and after sending him some demos, Sony signed Carter, and financed I Believe You Are A Star, including the installation of a Portacom studio for his back garden, neatly delivered by crane. He loved his new studio environment. “Sony actually put a lot of money into that record just purely because it took me so long to make it ... they bought a Portacom building, they craned it in, that was a great moment. Those sheds are actually very metallic, so you can hear this cheap sort of reverb through the entire record, which I kind of like.”
Reading the media from the around the time of the release of I Believe You Are A Star, a lot was made of the gap between the first Dimmer EP and the album. Carter’s irritation at repeatedly being asked that same question shows, telling Pavement magazine in 2001, “I knew that was going to be the question … and I haven’t brought my Xeroxed reply.”
However, he was busy during those seven years. Apart from creating the first Dimmer single and EP, Carter jammed with King Loser, and played guitar on their B-side ‘Exit the King’. He played on Alastair Galbraith’s 1998 album For Free, recorded ‘The Name Of The Game’ with Fiona McDonald for 1995’s ABBA tribute album Abbasalutely, and completed the (legendary) second Rim Shot Frenzy song ‘Song for Lou’ with Roy Colbert. Sporadic live performances and the first Dimmer appearance at the 1997 Big Day Out also kept him on the radar, although the release of I Believe You Are A Star put him back in the public consciousness. However, the constant comparison between his new music and Straitjacket Fits did irritate. “It seemed to mystify a lot of people, but to me … there’s a thread between all of it … it’s a continuation, and a variation on a style.”
I Believe You Are A Star was a triumph critically, and is still considered Carter’s “masterpiece”. He agrees it’s his best album. “It’s still actually my favourite record I’ve made. I didn’t want to make a rock record, I just wanted to make a beautiful record on that one.”
The critics agreed. Gary Steel (Metro, 2001) gave it high praise. “I Believe You Are A Star is … possibly one of the most original, daring, and outrageously well-defined pieces of musical art to have emanated from this country.” The album was jam packed with ideas and inspirations, and Carter admits it is “the only record I’ve ever made where I deliberately wrote a record.”
He thinks this is where the Dimmer introversion started, as “the songs on that Dimmer record were all constructed singing lightly, little-y, and small-y into a microphone in a Portacom shed at night on my own, with no band and no loud drums, and getting off on the fact that I could actually whisper. It was, he says, a minimal way to make music. “Minimal with the notes, and minimal with the volume … learning how to use space and silence … there is this strata, a subtlety to it. It didn’t reach out like a lot of my brasher music did, but I found it more interesting to find a power without using any power.” By now the fluid Dimmer lineup revolved around Carter and drummer Gary Sullivan (formerly of Jean-Paul Sartre Experience), with Nick Roughan, Andy Morton, Tom Watson, Bic Runga (singing backing vocals on ‘All The Way To Her’), and Tristan Dingemans (HDU) adding parts on the album.
Some songs on the album came to be closely identified with Dimmer, including the soul-electronica ‘Evolution’, with its Elvis ’68 Comeback Special homage video (directed by Darryl Ward) showing the four ages of Carter, with his father playing an older incarnation of him – especially poignant, as he passed away not long after the video was shot. A second was the title track, with its insistent drum and bass, and a video where Carter realised a lifelong dream as a harness-racing driver, telling Real Groove in 2001 it was “a life highlight … when I draw up the top five, that’ll definitely be in there … looping the field at Alexandra Park.”
‘Drop You Off’ is another, with an ominous video that reflects the ambiguous lyrical content. “It was written about a relationship break-up,” Carter explains. “At the same time I read the James Ellroy book My Dark Place, which was about his mother, who was abducted and murdered … the whole song, it’s supposed to be sinister – it can be about the James Ellroy book, but it’s also about … knowing you’re going to break up with someone, and they don’t know, and how shitty it is … I like uneasiness … I love the implication of stuff going on under the surface.”
The New Zealand-only release of I Believe You Are A Star saw the album chart in the Top 20, but sales weren’t stratospheric, and Sony let Carter go. “Without tooting my horn, that’s a fucking classic record … record companies … they have to have a frame of reference to put you in … with Dimmer, they had no frame of reference whatsoever,” he says. “Your job as an artist is to see beyond those barriers, to try and invent something beyond … what everyone else is doing.” However, Malcolm Black had a different take, telling New Zealand Musician in 2004 that Sony releasing Carter was more to do with a lack of international pickup for the album, citing a common response from Sony affiliates as “there are no radio singles” regardless of how much they loved it.
But, onwards. A short local tour to promote the album, and then a new label beckoned for Dimmer, Festival Mushroom Records (FMR), who in 2004 released the next album, You’ve Got To Hear The Music. This was a different beast altogether, with a snappy lead single (‘Getting What You Give’), vocals that felt smooth as silk, and a soul inflection permeating the entire record. “I was really into Al Green and Marvin Gaye at that point,” Carter muses. “I wanted to … do a subtle sort of soul-infused thing. I was completely over rock music at that point.”...to be continued... - Amanda Mills and AudioCulture
trax:
01 Come Here 02 Backwards Is Backwards 03 Getting What You Give 04 Only One That Matters 05 Case 06 Lucky One 07 Happening 08 Searching Time 09 Reach Away 10 Concentration 11 Finality
…served by Gaius…
...The album is a delightful mix of techniques in arrangement and performance, with all of the musicians delivering terrific work. Haynes' drumming is absolutely wonderful here, lightly dancing around the other instruments; Flanagan's piano playing is equally light and delicate; Grimes' bass work is outstanding (during "Raoul" you have a chance to hear one of the few bowed bass solos on records of that era); and there's no more to be said about Kirk's sax and flute work that hasn't been said a hundred times, apart from the fact that the flute solos on "Snap Crackle" help this cut emerge as particularly outstanding. - Out of the Afternoon Review by Steven McDonald
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