OPPOSITE SEX came together by chance in the isolated North Island town of Gisborne. After a trip to Europe Lucy returned to Gisborne with a bass guitar and nothing to do, so she invented her own percussive style of playing and wrote strange and disturbing songs. She met 2nd hand bookshop owner Tim, who had found a drum-kit on a front lawn in a garage sale, and taught him how to play drums. Fergus, self-taught from listening to Guitar Player magazine CDs in his bedroom, completed the trio.
The sound they developed in splendid isolation is, they say, some kind of absurdist-logico mix of Euro pop, Beat poetry, and subterranean lo-fi adventuring. Drawing musical inspiration from such disparate elements as The Velvet Underground, Half Japanese and The Beatles and marrying it to lyrical themes of animal kingdoms, love and loss, and master/slave dialectics, OPPOSITE SEX reinvent alternative pop in a style of their own.
In the summer of 2011 Tim & Lucy relocated to Dunedin. Along with Fergus they recorded the album at Fishrider Studio in Dunedin. It retains the simplicity and space of their stripped down live sound, but in the studio they have found even more of the dark magic inhabiting their songs. The album was released by Dunedin underground psych-pop label Fishrider Records on CD and LP in November 2011.
Unexpectedly the album found it's way onto the playlist of some BBC radio shows in the UK early in 2012. The listeners of those shows loved the album (as have most reviewers around the world). As a result the original LP pressing sold very quickly indeed, with many copies sent to the UK mail-order. Fortunately, with the kind assistance of Occultation Recordings in the UK, the album will now be released in the UK on 180 gm LP and on CD on 23 April 2012.
“The new wave of New Zealand pop begins here....it’s remarkable, leaping from sea-sick waltzes and crunchy post-punk to ADD-pop (see the hyper opener “La Rat”) 4/5 Uncut (UK)
"It's absolutely brilliant...it does put me in mind of maybe The Mekons and the Raincoats and...the best pop band you've ever heard in your life. I absolutely adore it. It's going to be in my top five albums of the year definitely." Marc Riley, BBC Radio 6
“...one of those amazing pieces of ragged art that must simply be heard to be believed...Get it.” 9/10 Popmatters.com
“off-kilter pop of the finest order” Dagger ‘zine (USA)
“Highly addictive... “La Rat” is two minutes of insidiously catchy indie pop, the sort of thing reputations were forged on in the ‘80s” Leicester Bangs webzine (UK)
“a wonderfully spontaneous album... Sitting somewhere between oddball pop and disjointed 1970s No Wave, the album...It’s a debut album that contains all the elements you desire...” 8/10 Kicking Against the Pricks
“weird and fantastic... Opposite Sex is one of the most infectious local debuts of recent years.” 8/10 undertherader.co.nz
“head-nodding, chanting strangeness – the same eerie shimmer that bands like Black Tambourine and The Raincoats achieved.” Volume #15
“Where pop and anti-pop collide... wonderfully curious and weird.” Cheese on Toast
New release of the day: OPPOSITE SEX s/t CD (Fishrider), “the next wave of swoony Dunedin New Zealand pop.” WFMU Radio New Jersey
"blending French ye-ye pop with classic ’77 artpunk, sugary sweet vocal delivery and tons of waltz. Truly a unique band with a sound completely their own" Art is the Enemy (Sweden)
“While their psychedelia listening and understated indiepop cool are spiritual descendants of [the Dunedin Sound], their metier lies in absurdist flights of fancy drawn from weird, lolling melodies that hang on to themselves for dear life... a Weimar sea shanty as Jad Fair might have written and Alison Statton might have sung.” Sweeping the Nation (UK)