The Garbage and the Flowers (formerly of Wel­ling­ton and now based in Sydney; Myspace) are tour­ing NZ.

They’re play­ing tomor­row night (Fri­day Nov 2nd) at Happy with Birchville Cat Motel and Pan­el of Judges.

Com­ing out of Son­ic Youth-drenched Wel­ling­ton, NZ in the early nineties, The Garbage & the Flowers were always going to be an anom­aly. Denounced as the fifty-thou­sandth band to sound like the The Vel­vet Under­ground, and even as a Chris­ti­an band in the loc­al street press, the five-piece nev­er­the­less built up a sol­id gang of devotees, who claimed their sound to be “unique, frac­tured, and psy­che­del­ic” and ideal to take acid with and get stoned to. Cham­pioned by song­writer Alastair Gal­braith, they released a crit­ic­ally acclaimed first single, Catnip/Carousel , and double album, Eyes Rind As If Beg­gars, both on US labels. The lat­ter, with its “sun-burn­ing” and lyr­ic­al impro­visa­tions found them a secure place in the noise-pop can­on.

Former drum­mer Torben Tilly, now of Ber­lin based elec­tron­ic duo Min­it, described their sound thus:

In The Garbage & The Flowers (TGATF) there’s this crys­tal­line struc­ture of a song with its archi­tec­ture of chords and idio­mat­ic vocal melody. It’s some­thing quite arcane and folk­lor­ic, owing a lot to Helen and Yuri Frus­in’s song-writ­ing and Helen John­stones’ sap­phir­ine voice. Being a part of this 5‑pronged entity has been some­thing I have really enjoyed and has def­in­itely been influ­en­tial on my approaches to mak­ing music. If all the music­al parts work togeth­er in an almost mech­an­ic­al kind of way to cre­ate a song it can be really sat­is­fy­ing. Some­times how­ever, through our own haz­ard­ous doing as a band, these songs would become unhinged and col­lapse into frac­tured shards of noise and dis­union, lean­ing heav­ily like wine. This was espe­cially the case when play­ing live, even if it was inten­tion­al or acci­dent­al. Part of its beauty was that almost at the same instant that it was fall­ing apart it was begin­ning to fall back togeth­er again, cre­at­ing a coun­ter­point of mel­an­choly and joy. I quite like it when it is so chaot­ic and entangled. Some­how it feeds the ima­gin­a­tion and the music takes on a life of its own, reveal­ing secret pat­terns and ghosts in the record­ings.

Based in Sydney since 1997, The Garbage and the Flowers, now a three-piece, are return­ing to their home­land with revered Mel­bourne band, Pan­el of Judges for a five date tour. They will be play­ing songs from recent albums Coron­a­tion and Stoned Rehears­al, and to cel­eb­rate their forth­com­ing NZ tour a lim­ited edi­tion split Panel/Garbage & the Flowers 7″ will be pressed.