Punk Planet by Douglas Heaven

You can’t go much further than Dunedin, New Zealand, before you’re on the way back again. Nearly 20,000 kilometres away, give or take, it’s probably the remotest city in the world.

Wherever you go, though, it’s usually only the little things that change. A good friend who moved to New Zealand was struck most by the habits of barefoot supermarket shopping and thanking bus drivers. But as you stand there reflecting on how everything’s more or less the same on the other side of the world, you suddenly notice they have a different sky.

So it is with the Dunedin band High Dependency Unit (HDU), whose claims to fame include touring with Shellac and exciting John Peel enough to call them “one of the 10 best bands in the world you’ve never heard of”.

Starting off on the Christchurch-based independent label Flying Nun Records with Abstinence: Acrimony (1995), HDU have released 6 or 7 records (depending how you count) and a bunch of EPs of dirty psychedelic punk. This isn’t punk played with pace: HDU take their time, the songs building up to what for most bands would be a starting point. The vocals are the slow slur of a drunk proclaiming happily to a world hurrying by. Their sound has become even more drawn out, more ambient as they’ve aged.

You could argue that the ethereal soundscapes of their latest release, Metamathics (2008) – which drummer Dino Karlis pointed out was “the first album where we’ve used hand-claps, the first where we’ve used saxophone and the first where we’ve used piano” – aren’t punk at all, but I’m not going to. HDU just do things at a distance. Familiar enough to be uncanny; same bedrock, different sky.

The local New Zealand scene even has a name – the “Dunedin sound” - which is helpfully characterised by one well-known Internet source as “jingly jangly”. Indeed, Flying Nun Records was also a home to the Californian band Pavement who made up for not being local by being the jingliest jangliest band of the lot. If you wanted a more upbeat variety of Dunedin punk, check out the similarly psychedelic but far more bouncy Die Die Die! who share a split 7” with HDU.

All of HDU’s releases can be streamed by turning on the tap at highdependencyunit.bandcamp.com – but don’t rush things. Let it drip drip drip. If you need a chaser you can stream one song from Die Die Die!’s latest We Built Our Own Oppressors (2010) at diediedie.bandcamp.com.