The Sampler: Tiny Ruins, Billy Nomates, Maxine Funke

Tony Stamp reviews a hopeful collection about grief from Tiny Ruins, UK maverick Billy Nomates' second record, and the latest from Dunedin songwriter Maxine Funke.

Ceremony by Tiny Ruins

While doing press for her new album, Hollie Fullbrook has foregrounded what it’s about. Some years ago she suffered a miscarriage nineteen weeks into pregnancy, and after burying herself in work for a few years, found herself revisiting poems she’d written about the experience.

That would eventually lead to the new Tiny Ruins album Ceremony, a record which thoughtfully catalogues the wide range of emotions Fullbrook dealt with in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, but manages to sound constantly hopeful.  

Fullbrook told Rolling Stone that in the period following her loss, she was "super angry", and while that is part of the spectrum here, it’s spun into songs that feel guileless and pastoral. “Don’t tell me what I already know”, she sings in ‘Dogs Dreaming’, but her delivery, surrounded by sunny instrumentation and accompanied by a vocal close harmony, sounds like acceptance. 

Even the saddest tracks, like ‘Diving and Soaring’, manage to feel like something good is just around the corner. That song's chorus distils one of Fullbrooks' great skills, making a personal experience feel universal, in an economic number of words. Who hasn’t felt like their heart was diving and soaring? 

She told the website Brooklyn Vegan she presented the songs “very sadly and delicately” to her bandmates on acoustic guitar, but credits them as helping her mould them into new forms. Alex Freer adds a range of percussion to his confidently restrained drumming, Tom Healy, who also produced the album, shows a fondness for pitch effects that push his guitar into a higher register, and Cass Basil’s contributions on bass are intuitive as ever, reaching up the neck to provide countermelodies when they’re needed.

The band is undoubtedly crucial to this record’s sound and feel, and knowing the album’s genesis it’s hard not to hear them as a support system for Fullbrook - staying out of her way during vocal flights, and filling the gaps with sound when it’s needed.

It’s a record full of evocative lyrics about the movements of dogs’ paws while they dream or eating an apple to its core, alongside ones that hit hard, about being overwhelmed by sympathy cards, or on ‘Dear Annie’, knowing that grief is making her a bad friend.

In her interview with Rolling Stone, Hollie Fullbrook said one theme in her work is “The difference between how you feel internally and how you’re perceived externally”. It’s another broadly relatable idea, and speaks to why she’s shared what these songs are about.

The record ends with its first single, ‘The Crab/ Waterbaby’, which in this context as the finale delivers a huge emotional wallop. The first half concerns a crab leaving behind its shell, to which the singer responds, “Dude, I think I know how you’re feeling”.

She goes on to repeat “I need a ceremony/ I need a ritual”, and those words are heavy with meaning - in the absence of any formal or spiritual procedure to mark her loss, she made one herself - the ceremony is this album, and the album is Ceremony.

Cacti by Billy Nomates

When we were still unsure when lockdowns would end, the idea of the pandemic album became a cliché almost instantly. Perhaps people didn’t want to be reminded, but now that things are closer to our pre-COVID idea of normal, I’ve come to really value them as catalogues of a certain period in time.

The combination of people faced with their own mortality, uncertainty, and forced to stay at home, yielded fruitful, innovative results, and that applies to an album by a UK maverick which came out earlier this year, shaving off a certain amount of her trademark toughness to reveal a vulnerability and uncertainty it’s easy to relate to.

Tor Maries has been releasing music under the name Billy Nomates since 2020, following a period playing in bands, and then quitting music altogether. She attended a Sleaford Mods show and was so inspired she re-started her career as a solo act, with a debut in 2020 that felt indebted to that act, full of speak-singing and unfiltered honesty.

She appeared on a Mods track, and that band’s Jason Williamson appeared on one of hers. Another notable name provided a boost when Geoff Barrow of Portishead released the album on his record label Invada.

She speaks less on her follow-up, Cacti, and sings more, and while she’s still concerned with the UK class system, sexism, and the travails of the music industry, the record was inspired in part by living through a very surreal few years.

Lyrics on songs like that one, ‘Black Curtains in the Bag’, certainly feel like the work of someone observing their neighbours more than usual, noting that one character is “Really good in his heart but really bad in his mind”.

On ‘Balance is Gone’ she relays a sentiment familiar from days spent inside: “Everything is happening without me”. 

Recording for the album was split between Maries’ flat, where she used old drum machines and composed on a mini keyboard,  and Invada studios, fleshing out her ideas on their arsenal of synths.

The propulsive post-punk of her first album remains, but on compositions like the title track you can hear the artist pushing into new territory, vamping against a lateral keyboard groove, and deploying a slippery metaphor about plant life in the desert. 

One of the bigger steps away from Billy Nomates' scabrous past is ‘Fawner’, an acoustic ballad that’s complicated when you realise what it’s about - amusingly detailing her disdain for people networking at music industry events.

In case you were wondering what she’s referring to when she concludes “The game is rigged”, the sound of clinking glasses and chatter provides a clue.

Billy Nomates has broadened her range on Cacti and softened in certain aspects, but lyrically she’s just as scathing, and more importantly, always sounds full of conviction. The COVID theme isn’t blatant, but it’s there if you listen for it - one line goes “I dream of shutdowns now”, and there are multiple about going outside - but it’s still a continuation of her concerns about struggling against adversity of any kind.

Like any good artist, she advises listeners to find their own meaning, saying in the liner notes “I think it’s about surviving it all”.

River Said by Maxine Funke

Barely six months have passed since Pieces of Driftwood, a collection of non-album tracks by Dunedin artist Maxine Funke that was among the best releases of last year.

Funke has already followed up Pieces of Driftwood with a set of new recordings called River Said, which combines her intimate, unassuming acoustic songs with field recordings and ambient noise, and manages to make them all feel of a piece: words and sounds focused on the natural world and everyday life in Ōtepoti.

Most of the tracks here start with a sound familiar to anyone who’s recorded themselves at home - Funke sliding her acoustic guitar into position after hitting record.

The songs are similarly personal - in ‘Afterwards’ she addresses an old friend, asking if they remember “tablecloth tents” and “summers of gorse”. The lines are simple and conversational but weighted with a large depth of feeling.

They’re also so stripped back that minor additions are impactful, like the backing vocal and brief synth in ‘Call On You’.

That track mentions a river, bracken and vines, and returns to the idea of friendship, touching on someone afflicted with shyness. Musically, like many of these tunes, it leads you toward certain chords before delivering ones that surprise.

I think despite the simplicity of recording, the way Funke captures these tracks may be the most important thing. The goal seems to be getting everything in one take, bottling a certain feeling.

She told 15questions.net: “I make things sound good by using an old reel-to-reel, finding the right angle with a mic. Every mic or recording device has its own voice, I like the papery sparkly texture of digital and digital effects, I like the body and warmth of magnetic tape, I like the realness of a cassette deck.”

River Said is out on the UK label Disciples, an offshoot of the prestigious Warp Records, but it’s a very NZ album. Maxine Funke excels at detailing life surrounded by nature, in songs that are striking because of their modest nature.

When the record segues into two ambient-adjacent tracks built on field recordings, cello, and synth, it’s thematically consistent, her lyrics becoming the actual sounds of water, wind and birdsong. Allow yourself to sink into them and the rewards will become apparent.