Track By Track: Cookie Brooklyn and the Crumbs 'Singles 2013​-​19' + Videos

Featuring members of such titanic local combos as Marineville and Orchestra Of Spheres, Te Whanganui-a-Tara's Cookie Brooklyn & the Crumbs are launching their era-spanning compilation Singles 2013-19 this week. Hosting a must-attend release event at Pyramid Club on Saturday, the sonically boundless trio of Mark Williams, Nell Thomas and Erika Grant have shared a very special sneak peek at their new record, casting their "beatnik-pop" tunes in a brand new light with illuminating commentary on every song — plus a look at videos for 'Gecko', 'POPO OD' and 'Robert Rauschenburg'.

You can order your own limited vinyl LP copy to cherish forever over at the group's Bandcamp page HERE, hand numbered in a limited edition of 100 with a cover designed by Luke Wood (Ilam Press Records). Notably, "all of the songs were recorded in one day by Warwick Donald in Newtown, Wellington, with each track being one of a maximum of 3 takes, with the band playing live in a room." Lucky windy city gig-goers can head along on Saturday, grab a record on the door at a discounted price and experience screenings of videos for each track on the record, plus mulled wine and soup! Take it away Cookie Brooklyn & the Crumbs...

Cookie Brooklyn & the Crumbs Release Party
Saturday 30th July - Pyramid Club, Wellington
Tickets available HERE via UTR [with LP / entry only options available]

Gecko

We have a lot of songs about animals and their useful habits. The Satan Leaf-Tailed Gecko has a leaf-y tail which it can shed when cornered. Who wouldn’t want that?

The video for this song was shot in a private garden in Te Puke which is themed around Alice in Wonderland.

Is there Logic in Pop?

Logic is a template for a lot of our song writing — a sketchy or scuffed guitar, a groove, voices dropping in and out, punctuation. The lyrics are cut up statements by musician/artist Mayo Thompson about the creative process.

Walking the Turtle

We always kept this song pretty open, with a wonderful pregnant pause around the stops as we looked for a cue. The singer is imagining certain colourful characters in the neighbourhood as a 21st century update of the French flâneur, so-called ‘gentlemen strollers of city streets’.

Kestrels

A lot of animals have special powers of vision beyond human perception. Kestrels search for food by seeing ultra violet light in their prey’s shit. The seasick string bends and snap of the band lead to a Crumbs trick, the big release.

POPO OD

Another song cutting up interviews with Mayo Thompson, this time about how collectivism, even in utopian/dystopian movements (like punk, or squatting, maybe) ultimately founders on really basic questions, like who will do the washing up. For the record, it’s my turn.

This video was made by John Pain aka Hallelujah Picassos/painspeople. Find John on Twitter at @painj.

Tahi, Rua, Toru, Whā

This song worked once the opening melody became divided up as a call and response between guitar and bass. Words are a litany of childhood lessons meted out of context or meaning by useless adults. Things have changed, a bit.

Puff of Air

We all found this track simultaneously awesome and very funny — Erika's mean bass line and Nell's floor tom thump channel our inner cave person. The words are from a science paper studying empathy in chickens. The lab tech blew a puff of air on the chicks, Mother Hen's heart rate increased.

Childless Man at the Zoo

A 2 chord song that miraculously worked on the day we recorded it, all of the spaces, inflections and arrangement falling into place in this take. A visit to the Zoo, various forms of entrapment, while the ice cream drip, drip, drips.

Robert Rauschenburg

This song is pure beatnik Crumbs with its lurchy free for all breakdown derailing the songs punky beginning. Bottle it, maybe you get ‘Eau de Crumb’. A song about Mayo Thompson’s time as a studio assistant to pop artist Robert Rauschenburg in the 1970s. Rauschenburg was known partly for his unlikely juxtapositions or ‘combines’, like a goat wearing a tyre.

A video by Guillame Cailleau.

Top Hat and Funny Face

This song ends the record with the Crumbs speaking into the void. It's a song about being lazy, bored and amused on a summer night. Anything is possible, but why try? “I’ve tasted caviar, I've tasted more”.