3 out of 5

Kozilla: 4 our of 5

Nightlunch: 2 out of 5

Label: trace / untrace

Produced by:  Nick Graham, Zac Nicholls

A split LP by Dunedin bands Koizilla and Night Lunch; I came for the latter band, and stayed for the former.

Night Lunch tickle my affinity for two person noise acts, and their fuzz-based stomp-beated silly approach very much appealed in the first few songs I sampled. notably not from this set, which the bandcamp in part describes as “off-the-cuff.” …And that seems somewhat accurate, as these five tracks are all rather uninspired, getting some minor grooves going on Lactic Fascist and instrumental Fence Song – and a nice little boogie on closer Dad’s House – but none of these go anywhere, with that last boogie amounting to about a one-line joke before bowing out. Part of this repetitiveness is of NL’s style, I suppose I just get more oomph and originality out of previous incarnations, whereas this is closer to a template – a need to put down some songs, getting some riffs done, and hitting record. At the very least, I appreciate that the duo sounds like they’re having fun. Some aural touchpoints might be an amped up PUSA, thanks to the bass-heavy sound, or a similarly harsher Whirlwind Heat.

But over on Koizilla’s side, we find a band sprawling across some noisy indie styles fleshed out with a full sound – lots of layers, some freakin’ flutes – and bridging a gap, though timelessly, between 90s and 00s indie, with an early Built to Spill / Matador Records crunchy pop sound heading into a crunchier, mid-00s Yeah Yeah Yeahs kind of aggression. And lest you roll your eyes at some of these references as being derivative, that’s rather the point: Koizilla swoops through them but does not swipe; there’s an odd middleground of ramshackle looseness but confident precision in the way this is presented that grabs your ear right away, with only closer Dead Ferns somewhat petering out across its six minutes – shaving its coda off for another track might’ve sealed the deal on this set.