‘Red Bird’ by Elider hits you from the get go.

It’s not the most sonically sophisticated thing you will ever hear, but it’s brains, without the stellar budget it actually deserves.

The album cover belies what you are about to find inside. The image is of an abstract bird drawn like a deformed easter egg. It’s a beautiful, naive piece of art, and the packaging is thoroughly well constructed, somewhat like the music it contains.

Justin Harris has a knack for juxtaposing pure pop that no one else thought of, with the deepest of indie homegrown grooves.

That said several of the tracks have a wide angle sound that could have, in years gone past, made someone a million.

Ben Cole is responsible for the live drums, which seem to be simpatico with Harris’s song vision.

In many ways, the album resembles the ethic of New Zealand Music three decades ago. The elements aren’t new, but there is a freshness and honesty that is only available to outsiders who absorb and collect, and then have the intellectual and musical strength to arrive at their own conclusions.

It could be said that Lift was lifted from The Verlaines‘ playbook. Then there is Your Silent Face which sounds like Dave Yetton (JPSE) backed up by “Whamo” period Bailter Space which, all things considered, is quite a good thing.

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