You can buy it as a download (WAV, lossless FLAC, MP3), CD or very limited edition (of 150) LP direct and easily from the Opposite Sex Bandcamp page.
This is the best option for Opposite Sex and Fishrider and also for you. When you buy the CD or LP via the Opposite Sex bandcamp page you receive an immediate free download of the album so you can enjoy it while it finds its way to you from Fishrider HQ in Dunedin, New Zealand. We ship straight away by airmail and it usually only takes 5-6 days to the UK.

Alternatively, Rough Trade in London have the CD and LP available instore and mailorder
And Pebble Records will also have it from early February 2012

If you are in the US or Canada you can get it from CDBaby (who also ship to the UK of course)

It’s also available on iTunes.

If you want your local store to stock it tell them to e-mail us at fishrider ( dot ) records ( at ) yahoo ( dot ) co ( dot ) nz

New Jersey/ New York radio station WFMU called the album “the next wave of swoony Dunedin New Zealand pop” when they made it their album of the day last week. This song in particular does remind us in it’s own propulsive galloping way of The Clean’s “Tally Ho!” which originated from Dunedin many years ago and helped start a little label called Flying Nun Records.

The video stars Bruce the rat and most of the other footage used here is the band recording in their rehearsal space in Dunedin’s Victorian-era industrial underground in November 2011.

It’s lovely when the first review for an album we’ve believed in so much get’s what the music is about … even better that it is from someone on the other side of the world in the UK. Click the image to read the whole review.

Update… January 2012
Here’s some more review quotes for the album:

“The new wave of New Zealand pop begins here… Opposite Sex share with their compatriots a penchant for vernacular psychedelia and lop-sided songwriting….For a debut, it’s remarkable, leaping from sea-sick waltzes and crunchy post-punk to ADD-pop (see the hyper opener “La Rat”) **** (4/5) Uncut (UK)

New release of the day: “The next wave of swoony Dunedin New Zealand pop.” WFMU Radio, New Jersey

“head-nodding, chanting strangeness – the same eerie shimmer that bands like Black Tambourine and The Raincoats achieved… some people will fall in love and defend it to the death” Volume #15

“Where pop and anti-pop collide… Opposite Sex’s debut album is wonderfully curious and weird.” Cheese on Toast

“a record of duality and uniqueness. ..Opposite Sex have created a manic, ever-progressing experiment of peculiar pop. A perplexing, disarming but ultimately fascinating listen.” The Corner

Opposite Sex - underground in Dunedin November 2011

Opposite Sex reconvened as the full three-piece in Dunedin in November for their album release with guitarist Fergus travelling from Hamilton for some shows. While he was here Lucy & Tim thought they should do some more recording for several new songs Lucy had written since the album was recorded in April. They decided to record at their underground practice space – a long narrow windowless concrete basement in an old industrial building in Dunedin. The space has amazing acoustics, with a strategically-placed room microphone creating natural reverb for the recordings.

Opposite Sex - EP recording sessions - underground in Dunedin November 2011

Opposite Sex - recording in Dunedin's victorian industrial underground

The album recording sessions back in April were a pretty special experience. But hearing the band and Lucy’s songwriting develop so quickly this year has made these new sessions feel like being in on the creation of something even more exciting. Not sure what these will become…. maybe an EP, 10″ vinyl or some singles… lathecut limited editions. Who knows?

La Rat checks out the debut album by Opposite Sex

Looking back at the recording session notes for these songs about a third of the songs were single takes, another third required two takes, the rest three takes. Bands are always recorded live in the same room at Fishrider. There’s lots of spill between the microphones and it is all kept as natural and relaxed as possible, just like a practice. “La Rat” which opens the album was recorded first take, with live vocals too. A second vocal was added to double the vocal line but otherwise it is a live in the studio recording, perfect first time. Opposite Sex were a joy to work with. They just played their songs and we all knew straight away if the take was a “keeper” or not.

It was obvious that there was a strong and diverse album in those songs and I wanted to release them as an album. Fishrider Records isn’t “music industry”: it’s “music arts & crafts” so no point messing around with singles and EPs to establish Opposite Sex and develop their market or whatever the industry terminology is these days… let’s do this old-school, we thought, like the 1970s, when a band announced their arrival with a debut album.

We enlisted the help of Fishrider Record’s regular mixing guru Tom Bell to apply some of his magic to the Fishrider Studio recordings. It was a very cold winter in Dunedin with several snow storms and periods of sub-zero temperatures. Tom reckons his bed was the warmest place in the house where his studio is located so he mixed some of this album in bed.

And so, 7 months later the album is available from 7 November 2011 as a download, CD digipak and (by mid-November) in a limited edition (of 150) vinyl pressing, and ready to work it’s way into the consciousness of the planet’s discerning music community. We love it at Fishrider – we hope you will too.

Sea Shanty video

So here’s our zero budget video we made up on the spot. You are meant to have story-boards for video shoots. We didn’t. What made it all work was Lucy’s performance miming to the song with nothing more than a piece of kelp as a prop. And also Tim’s willingness to wear liberal quantities of green face paint, a surf hood adorned with gaffer tape fins and a lump of kelp on his back. Afterwards we decided that an underwater world needed fish. Green-screening stop motion animation provided some of them. It’s very time-consuming. Then Lucy had the brilliant idea of moving the fish in real time…

Finally we wanted Fergus to be involved, even though he was a thousand miles away. Thanks to his friend Daniel Phillips who lent him his old wetsuit and took a couple of hundred stills of Fergus, I was able to animate him into the underwater world as well.

But Not The Majic Seal

“My brother has found a songbook from 1974, written in my sixteenth, his fifteenth year. It is a relic from the days when the two of us, with one or two friends, recorded cassettes in my bedroom, the front room of our house in Invercargill. It was made to accompany But Not the Majic Seal, the second of our releases and the first to be credited to Crazy Olé and the Panthers (the first of our cassettes, Good Taste and The Public Tongue, had been made in the name of Evintrude the Ruth). The book is handmade, with lined notepad pages (and some unlined, slightly smaller pages bearing archly titled watercolour illustrations). In pen and Letraset, the lyrics for the original songs on the cassette, mostly mine with a poem of Lindsay’s, are set out neatly. In the front of the book is the track listing, which also includes some Velvet Underground classics and the finale from Peter Hammil’s Plague of Lighthouse Keepers off Van Der Graf Generator’s H to He album; in the rear of the book are the personnel credits. I have taped a picture of a termite queen from Maeterlink’s book on the subject in the front, as though to segue directly into rock’n'roll from my school days.

Track listing

When I resumed serious songwriting, so as to have something for my bands to play, I avoided the painful and tricky subject of love and reality; surrealism, protest, and drugs were my inspirations. Even after I had written good personal songs, I was often unable to sing them clearly and loudly enough: for years I hid behind the notion that I was not a good singer. Part of the problem was, that I had no very clear notion of who I was singing for; my vocal performances would vary widely, depending on my self-conscious interpretation of the context. What exactly does it mean, making the private public? It seems to me that, unless you are an emotional idiot, you will face this problem again and again until such time as you are prepared to assert, admit, confess or boast that you are an artist, and need not be subject to the same considerations as other people. This is what is meant by suffering for one’s art, and it is true whether you are a painter, moviemaker, or whatever.

By the same token, if you want to write love songs, you need to deal with the girlfriend reading them over your shoulder. If her critique is drying up your inspiration, it’s likely the same story in bed, and she doesn’t need to go out with an artist, any more than you need to sleep with a critic. A lover who gives you carte blanc, a muse who doesn’t know she is one, or a partner who likes to understand your songs, but who accepts that sometimes you don’t understand them yourself, and who feels flattered when you write a good song, not a flattering one; these are your friends. What they have in common is that the song is free to exist above and beyond your relationship (unless you have children, it is the part that will survive the longest). It’s only a map of the battlefield, not the action itself.

This For You - words and painting by GDH

Opposite Sex

And so Opposite Sex played with The Puddle (and an orchestra of chirping crickets) in Gisborne at the Kingfisher Bar. It was a noisy set mixing trace elements of of pop, rockabilly and melodic post-punk with waltzes and time changes, percussive bass and soaring flights of melody. It seemed like their music defied any conventions and stylistic genres and it made The Puddle think of the freeform sounds of the alternative fringes of New Wave in the late 70s and early 80s… a time well before the lives of the three members of Opposite Sex – Lucy (bass, vocals), Tim (drums, vocals) & Fergus (guitar) – even began.

Lucy & Tim relocated to Dunedin to study and took up our invite to record. Fergus came down and, over a weekend in April 2011, Opposite Sex recorded the songs that will make up their debut album at Fishrider Studio. They somehow manage to fuse together elements of melodic post-punk, new wave, French pop, jazz, and rockabilly and a whole lot more and still come away sounding distinctly Antipodean. One of the defining characteristics of the best alternative Kiwi pop has always been the ability to assimilate all sorts of strange and unrelated pop culture influences, blend in something dark and unsettling that perhaps comes from a sense of isolation and hopelessness, and express these as something unique and out of step with the rest of the music world.

Here’s a little sample of Opposite Sex with the DUD#2 Comic Collective Compilation mix of “Sea Shanty (Under the Sea)”

Check out the page Introducing… Opposite Sex for more info and sounds.

The Puddle album has been gathering some sweet reviews too:
“…a heavy, confusing, heady and eccentric album. It has all the usual parts you’d expect: drums, bass, guitars, singing, verses, choruses etc; but it puts them together in such a hallucinatory way it sounds like something quite new… to follow it intently is to fall down the rabbit-hole for 12 songs. Mandatory listening for undergraduate boys.” 5/5 Waikato Times

“fans of Pavement and the 1990s American slack school can squint and see the southern-hemisphere source of those insouciant grooves, and the decision to retell Norse mythology chug-guitar-style on the nine-minute Valhalla is inspired.” Sunday Times (UK)

“further evidence that The Puddle are enjoying the kind of career high which other bands experience in their youth then lose” www.elsewhere.co.nz

“The track about about what Thor, Odin, and his mates get up to in the wee small hours (think Iggy singing Beowulf) is the mad but gripping centrepiece of this set… shows the second wind that frontman George D Henderson’s band have shown on their noughties albums is still blowing strong… Might be time to sign up for that cult following.” 4.5/5 NZ Herald

“…a rollicking cohesive swagger, quirky yet very comfortable with itself. Like the best bits of Flying Nun. Emphasis on lurid simplicity, curly Q&A, unexpected nuance in amongst the somewhat twisted innocence and pure iron. Beautiful cover art by Tanya Hoarfrost, especially if gorgeous frolicking nymphs is your thing. Get it.” NZ Musician

“Right from the get-go, Henderson’s lyrics and delivery grab you by the short and curlies: unmoderated, direct, contentious, outrageous. The overall picture is of a slightly deranged individual, with his shaky, manic vocals reinforcing this raw art… There is a very bottom-of-the-world hopelessness about these songs, but in their own way, they’re great songs, and even, sometimes, pop songs… Like a punk-edged Syd Barrett who has lost, then found himself again (while remaining seriously askew), George Henderson and his Puddle have managed to squeeze out a short but potent work… There’s nothing else quite like it.” www.witchdoctor.co.nz

George has provided the following track-by-track commentary on the album:

What I Believe
This first song relates directly to the romantic genesis of the album; at a Puddle gig at Chicks Hotel (September 9th 2005) I heard a name from the past, and saw a face from my future; made plans to travel to Auckland to be with the one I love; two days later Richard Steele rang me out of the blue and offered to record The Puddle in Wellington; I fly there from Auckland, where in the meantime I had written this song (amongst others); meet the band and record the album on a honeymoon high. There were screeds more lyrics for this one; the main riff and chorus phrase quote from a 1981 song by The And Band (1980-1981). Richard Steele’s massed brass takes this to another level.

Rainbow Bridge Airlines
Also based on an And Band recording, one I made with Mark Thomas, filtered through rockabilly and krautrock psychedelia. I revived and reworked it in Auckland to form a conceptual link to Valhalla.

English Speaking World
This is one of maybe two songs I wrote during my whole ten year “dead to the world” Hep C period, composed on Peter Gutteridge’s old player piano in the late 1990’s. The chorus (“You’ve got to get in to get out”) is lifted from “The Carpet Crawlers”, the star track on everyone’s favourite Genesis album, “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”.

Purple Horse
Based on a half-song written in Christchurch 1981, to which Lindsay Maitland contributed some of the more “literary” lines, and (like all the songs here which date from the And Band period) very much completed much later, shortly before recording. The last verse is quoted from Rimbaud’s fragment, “Est-elle Almée?” My French here may be atrocious, but so, by all accounts, was Rimbaud’s English.
The organ is a digital Hammond B3; the first and last time I’ve fallen in love with a digital instrument.

Delmore Schwartz (In Dreams)
Absolutely and completely modern love song written and completed shortly before recording the album. Nils Olsen, who plays the lovely liquid sax lines here, used to play in a band called Let’s Get Naked, who were contemporaries of the early Puddle. Their best known song was “Funky Dunedin”.
“Imagine” by John Lennon was the first record I bought.

Valhalla
This song grew and grew from the mere pleasure of playing metallic riffs. My favourite record in my parent’s collection as a child was a 45 of “The Ride of the Valkyrie”, best played loud. When I was a child, beginning to learn School Cert music in high school, I was made to study in a dusty backroom cluttered with musical detritus while the 7th formers listened to Led Zep and Pink Floyd in the main classroom (it was there that I first heard a Syd Barrett song winging its way through the wall, a pivotal moment in my relationship with sound). I used to pore over an encyclopedia of music; the entry on Wagner’s Siegfried was illustrated with photographs and diagrams of the dragon from Fritz Lang’s film of that name. A six-legged French river dragon encountered earlier in Look and Learn also made its way into this song. What I know about Norse and Germanic mythology I learned in primary school in Scotland. I was deeply impressed by the mood of blood and gloom in those stories in which no-one, not even a God, lives happily ever after.
The Norwegian Black Metal bands will probably put a fatwah on me when they hear this.

Sleepy People
This is a true Dunedin Sound song, written and arranged in 1985, and originally performed by The Puddle as myself, Ross Jackson, Lesley Paris, Peter Gutteridge and Lindsay Maitland. Misanthropic, environmental, and sentimental, it’s my favourite lyric of that era.

Wise Dolls
A favourite of the 1993 “Thursday/Too Hot to be Cool” era Puddle. Some floozies are working over some gangster, in the lyric I wrote, but people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. The riff is an homage to Microdisney’s “Big Sleeping House”. This is one of the tracks where Heath Te Au’s amazing drumming is heard at its best.

Weight of the Stars
This song existed, as its first verse only, in (yes) The And Band era, composed on chloral in a dark and poky Clifford flat on Bealey Ave. The early version was only played once and recorded by Ian Henderson in Invercargill. It was completed in 2005 in Auckland in my lover’s house and recorded first with Bryan Spittle, my Mink collaborator. Both Ian’s version and Bryan’s feature rhythm loops, making this one of the few Puddle songs to ever go anywhere near a drum machine. Richard has progged this up considerably by treating the guitars like synths, bringing out all the mechanical dissonance implicit in the original riff.

Monogamy
This might be my favourite Puddle song, because of the way it just poured through my mind onto the guitar one day in 1982. It took me less time to write this song than it takes to play it here. I only realized recently that the lyrics might owe something to Kevin Ayers’ “Shouting in a Bucket Blues” (“I might say that I love you, but that would be a lie. I can only say I try, and I know it”), a song I last heard in 1976 (in fact, I realise only now how much my songwriting owes to an early and half-forgotten exposure to the best work of Kevin Ayers). A good example of Ross Jackson’s feel for the bass; when you play a song like this, you want to relax into it, and that’s only possible when the bass player’s got your back. Richard Steele plays the organ, with more jazzy levitation that’s beyond me. Monogamy is a song that’s on nearly every Puddle LP, because every lineup plays it differently. It’s our “My Favourite Things”.

It’s the album that the Puddle’s George D. Henderson has always wanted to record and it sounds unlike anything else The Puddle have released, while still retaining that familiar and unique sound. Producer Richard Steele (a saxophone player briefly for The Puddle when he was a student in Dunedin in the early ’90s) brought the band to Wellington and put them in Inca Studios under the expert sound recording engineering guidance of Mike Gibson. At that time The Puddle consisted of George plus long-time Puddle collaborator Ross Jackson on bass and Heath Te Au (who had played drums in Mink with George in the mid 1990s). This line-up of The Puddle had played together since about 2001. Let loose in a studio for 3 days they recorded two dozen songs, selecting half for completion for this album. Completing the overdubs and mixing took another few years (during which time George, with a new Puddle line-up recorded “No Love – No Hate” and “The Shakespeare Monkey” at his brother’s home recording studio in Dunedin). And finally.. well, here we are!

The album is also being pressed on vinyl (another mission in itself) and should be available in this format (with free digital download) from November 2010. The cover art is by Dunedin underground artist Tanya Hoarfrost. The CD booklet features a drawing for each track and the vinyl edition will have an illustrated lyric sheet.

Once the vinyl version is available to album will be distributed to NZ retail stores. The CD version (and possibly also vinyl) will be available from CDBaby in the US, from Powertool Records in Germany, and from Pebble Records in the UK. If all else fails, or if you like to deal direct with the label, e-mail us at fishrider (dot) records (swirly at sign thing) yahoo (dot) co (dot) nz and we’ll work out a way to get your chosen Puddle album format to you quickly.