Tidal Rave - Heart Screams (2020)

Wellington based six-piece band Tidal Rave continues a New Zealand (and Australasian) tradition of dark, compelling guitar and keyboard lead garage rock.

There’s something slightly claustrophobic and unsettling at times about the churning dense weave of the three guitars and bass backed by ghostly organ and insistent drum pulse.

Add the character provided by the interchange between three songwriter-guitarist-vocalists, one with distinctive vibrato reminiscent of The Terminals’ ominous baritone proclamations, and it’s possible to imagine this album as the product of another era.

Tidal Rave started out of bedroom jam sessions in a Nikau St flat in the inner-Wellington suburb of Newtown, developing into 6-piece band which released a self-titled EP in 2017 and toured NZ and Melbourne, Australia.

Heart Screams is the band’s first album. The 9 tracks by guitarist-songwriters Ellis, Gedye Taylor, and Paterson, woven together with backing vocals by keyboard player Keating, are alternately dark and euphoric; universal themes touching on inner hopes and anxieties, external threats (real and imagined), all set against the monotony of day to day living in the narrow streets of NZ’s wind-rattled capital city.