Description
Following the unparallelled artistic and commercial success of Crazy?Yes!Dumb?No! in 2006, The Mint Chicks made a series of moves which might have made no sense to outsiders, but mirrored perfectly the internal logic of their machine.
Firstly, when you’ve finally cracked the local market, won a boatload of Tuis and gotten mainstream radio play with your bizarro pop, surely it behooves you to retrench and pay back some of that faith? Instead they booked tickets to Portland, capital of the indie rock universe maybe, but around 11,000 kilometres away from the place which had finally, after five years, figured out how to love the prickly young men. And when the chemistry of your band is paramount, the strange impulses audible in your music now making perfect sense, speaking in unison for maybe the first time, surely then it’s incumbent upon you to keep that unit together?
So parting company with (and not replacing) bassist Michael Logie, often the only guy who looked like he was actively enjoying the process, almost takes you back to square one. Which, it turns it out, is probably exactly where they want to be. Screens sounds like a brand new band making their first record.