Artist Profile: Menzies

Photo Credit: Samuel Scully

Menzies took its official form as the alternatingly blistering and eerily tranquil alt-country, post-punk efforts of Wellington-based songwriter Chris Brown with the release of the group’s debut album Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm in May. But it’s the ethos behind the record—one of stark intention and an utter disregard for expectation or unnecessary complications—that, beyond the genre descriptions, shines through every twist and turn on the record, stemming directly from Brown’s unflinchingly pure and direct approach to his own creative activity.

Although Brown has only dove into solo songwriting with Menzies over the past few years, his journey (and his fascination) with music date back to his exposure to his father’s extensive collection of classic rock CDs and records. They had a sunroom in his childhood home where the stereo system was housed, and some of Brown’s earliest memories involve resting in that room in the late afternoon while BB King, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles worked their way through the room’s gentle rays of light.

Naturally, Brown’s first inclination was to pick up the electric guitar. But when he asked his parents for permission to take lessons, his mother offered to strike a bargain. If he would train classically on the piano first, he could learn the acoustic guitar afterwards.

Brown reluctantly agreed, and although he recalls his piano lessons as somewhat grueling, the contrasting ways he ultimately approached the two instruments granted him a wide breadth of both technical knowledge and musical intuition.

“I'm really glad it went that way because now I do like pretty much all of my playing and songwriting on guitar. It still feels like this fun  side project.I don't really know the theory. It's just this toy that I play with. Whereas [with] piano, I'm more mathematical about it.”

As he got older, it was the indie-folk scene of the early and mid 2010s that truly captured his imagination. It was the era of Bon Iver and the Fleet Foxes, and most of Brown’s musical memories from those years center around his and his friends’ annual attendance of the Wellington Folk Festival in Wainuiomata.

Apart from a few years in London when Brown was pursuing photography, those musical interests remained near the forefront of his creative consciousness, and as Brown got older, he found himself seeking out more guitar-based, dissonant sounds in his daily listening, falling in love with 90s rock acts like Galaxie 500 and Yo La Tengo.

“The stuff that I like more and more in recent years just holds a bit more tension in it at the end of the day. The folkier stuff of my teens or even early 20s just resolves itself more. You're sitting more with classic chord patterns and whatnot, which I still love and use myself all the time. But then over the last year, more recently, I've appreciated things that hold a lot more tension in the song, but still give you enough satisfaction to keep you there.”

When his long-time friend Connor asked him to join his new project, Friendlies, as a live keys player, Brown jumped at the opportunity. Although the keys parts were largely already set by Connor by the time Brown jumped into rehearsal, they left plenty of room for Brown to experiment and elaborate on them in his own fashion, and his involvement with that project gave him hands-on experience not only with arranging but performing in a more professional band setting—something he had quietly longed for since he stopped playing in bands in his high school days.

But as Brown re-immersed himself in music, he started having short snippets of ideas for songs and melodies pop into his head again, and slowly but surely, he felt the urge to begin carving out his own lane as a songwriter. When Connor decided to bring Friendlies to an abrupt end, Brown leapt at the opportunity, bringing both Connor and fellow bandmate Nikita Piper into the fold with him.

Menzies was formed, and from the beginning, the intention of the project was clear—any idea goes as long as it wasn’t beholden to any concept of what a song, or the band as a whole, should ‘sound’ like or present themselves as.

“We had a saying or a rule—just do the cheesy thing. If it feels obvious and simple, then just do it. Don't try to make it more intelligent or more angular or whatever. Just shoot down the middle when it feels right and trust yourself to make it interesting enough that it's not going to be… something that everyone's heard a zillion times.”

That mentality, of course, helped Menzies stray away from any sort of fluff or false complexity on their debut EP, Spaghetti Land— a four-track mixture that saw Brown working off the cuff almost as often he was carefully planning his arrangements, forcing him to stretch and broaden his understanding of his creative horizons in the process.

But on Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm, it takes on a whole new complexion. The project’s 15 tracks are scattered with hallmarks of New Zealand culture—there’s references to sausage rolls, the All Blacks, and children’s entertainer Suzy Cato, and the interspersed PA announcements recorded on the Interislander Ferry help establish the project’s structure as a journey, wavering between a set of deeply sun-tinged alt-country motifs and a more unabashed post-rock delivery, situated in the unsettling frames of acts like Slint and Shellac.

“I think the reason [the interspersed ferry announcements] made so much sense is that—I also didn't realise this massively until we'd done the recording and maybe were doing the mixing of it— how many quite strong New Zealand references and touch points there are lyrically in the album… And so it made sense to thread this also very New Zealand ferry crossing intercom announcement through the album as well so that the record plays out like a crossing between two islands.”

At no point across the project’s 40-minute runtime, though, is anything shoehorned into this conceptual framework. Everything from the extended spoken word sequence on “All Black” to the cyclical mode of storytelling on “‘Appy,” feels almost inescapably authentic. The particular balancing act of Menzies’, however, is that their commitment to confronting the obvious head-on doesn’t necessarily always result in simplicity.  

Menzies (and, by extension, Brown’s entire songwriting venture) is an experiment in honesty just as much as it is an exploration of Brown’s tension-crafted musical desires. There is no intellectual buffer between each of his collaborators and the ultimate result of each track, and that, in a roundabout way, is the energy that permeates Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm.

Brown is still in the early stages of working on new tracks, driving his car up and down the coast of Wellington with chord progressions playing over his stereo while he improvises various melodies and works out the direction the songs should eventually follow. But as the next steps of Menzies continue to take shape, it will be this central creative identity that continues to define their work—Brown’s penchant for presentation and an astounding vulnerability that serves as Menzies’ guiding light.