Dimmer "There my Dear" 2006

...While not so much an exercise in electronic experimentation, You’ve Got To Hear The Music was an album both bold and tender, with tracks like ‘Only One That Matters’, ‘Lucky One’, and ‘Finality’ providing moments of hushed, fragile quiet among the grooves. The groove was set from the start with the track ‘Come Here’, one of Carter’s most overtly sexy tracks. “It’s meant to be quite steamy, that one … that is sexy, someone saying ‘come here’, so I thought ‘okay, I will.’” he says...
...You’ve Got To Hear The Music features 19 musicians other than Carter, including Anika Moa singing harmony vocals with Carter, creating a balance of sorts. “I wanted to get a feminine element into the vocals … where you have men and women singing the same kind of tunes, and so the lyrics become this universal story that can apply to anybody.” Carter has nothing but praise for Moa’s technique. “She nailed every song on the first take. She’s got incredible pitch … she’s got a musical purity to what she does.”
The soul-infusion on You’ve Got To Hear The Music worked, with the album going gold, and winning two New Zealand Music Awards (for Best Rock Album, and Best Group), and Carter has fond memories of the awards night, admitting “I don’t place importance on New Zealand music awards, but let’s just say I thoroughly enjoyed those two.” His description of the album as “campfire music for warped little souls” still intrigues, which he explains as “lots of the songs … had some sad, kind of pathetic groove to them that you’d sit around the camp and lamely clap your hands along [with] … [a] kind of organic campfire groove thing.”
The album was released with a bonus live acoustic disc recorded at a Live at Helen’s (RNZ’s Helen Young Studios], which Carter considers a favourite Dimmer recording, having “great duos with Anika of ‘Case’ and ‘Lucky One’ that I think are far superior to the recorded versions.” The recording also includes a sublime version of Straitjacket Fits’ ‘If I Were You’, which fits well within the set.
A tour followed, and in 2005, two completely different things occurred: the Straitjacket Fits reunion tour, and a request from Bic Runga to sing backing vocals on her Birds album. These coincided with a relationship break-up, which formed the basis for the next Dimmer album, There My Dear (2006).
Inspired by the concept of break-up albums, There My Dear has Carter mining his experiences for his art. Jeff Harford, talking to Carter for the Otago Daily Times in 2006, pondered to him that the songs loosely follow the seven stages of the grief, to which he replied, “It’s like a cycle … the last tune is a kind of resolution.” He expressed humour for the situation, telling Harford “I thought I would make it obsessively about the same subject. That was our big joke making it, actually. Each song was like (clenches fist and sobs pathetically), f… you.” Carter still has a similar view on it. “I thought … I’m just going to be obsessive, and completely naked about it, and just write about where it was, and what it was. It was very blunt.”
The Straitjacket Fits reunion tour was important for the direction of the album’s sound. “I think that gave me the idea to make just an immediate guitar record … with Dino [Karlis], and James Duncan, and Justyn Pilbrow played bass,” Carter remembers.
The songs were written quickly over a month. “Bic took me, Anna [Coddington], and Anika on holiday to Mahia … that’s where I had really full on experiences with Bic standing on the beach at midnight, and she’s seeing bodies in the deadwood, and I was crying about my break-up to the ocean. That’s where I wrote that song ‘What’s a Few Tears to the Ocean’, which was a mantra.”
The album was completed in Dunedin. “I came down and finished it off writing it in my dad’s old cottage by the river in Brighton … facing a fire, with the river at my back, “and recorded with a live band (the core of Karlis, Duncan, and Pilbrow) at the Grey Lynn Bowling Club, utilising the backing vocal trio of Moa, Runga and Coddington. There My Dear (released on Warners) mixed highly charged rock songs (‘You Don’t Even See Me’, and ‘Scrapbook’), with sparse, raw acoustic tracks (‘Mine’, and ‘You’re Only Leaving Hurt’).
Carter says ‘You’re Only Leaving Hurt’ emerged almost fully formed, one that “completely [dropped] out of the sky … I wrote that one in 25 minutes … it was just there on the tip of my tongue,” and was what he considered the other side of the story to the more visceral ‘Scrapbook’, another song he rates highly. There My Dear was successful (No.7 on the album charts in July 2006), although Carter is sceptical of the numbers, laughing “you know, New Zealand [that means] selling 150 copies. I’ll take that with a grain of salt!”...to be continued... - Amanda Mills and AudioCulture

trax:
01 Don't Even See Me 02 Going Nowhere 03 Under The Illusion 04 You're Only Leaving Hurt 05 Scrapbook 06 I Won't Let You Break My Heart Again 07 Mine 08 What's A Few Tears To The Ocean 09 Crystalator (Bonus) 10 Dawn's Coming In (Bonus) 11 Don't Make Me Buy Out Your Silence (Bonus) 12 Pacer (Bonus) 13 On The Road Again (Bonus)
…served by Gaius…