ZOOMERCORE
Connan Mockasin & Ade - It’s Just Wind
Hiiii Connan
It’s Just Wind is a collaborative album from New Zealand indie legend Connan Mockasin and his father Ade. The album was produced after Ade had a major heart attack, which made Connan realize that his life-long dream of making an album with his Dad needed to happen sooner rather than later. The two combine for 8 tracks of slow-burning, repetitive ambient pop. Although it might seem that nothing would please me more than a 45 minute Connan album produced in Marfa, TX, the record proves to be one of the most unrewarding albums I have heard in recent memory.
The instrumental pallet is similar to Connan’s previous work; twangy guitars, bobbing synths and punchy snares are It’s Just Wind’s meat and potatoes. Ade’s voice is somewhere between Sun Kil Moon-style old man stream-of-consciousness rambling and Leonardo Cohen’s gravelly-voiced half singing. While Connan has a few slow, mellow, inaccessible tracks in his discography, Its Just Wind seems hellbent on not rewarding its listener.
My biggest problem with It’s Just Wind is that it feels half-baked; it is as if the band woke up the morning of the assignment and remembered that they had to make 10 songs that day. There is a YouTube documentary that accompanies the album, on which Ade reveals that the album took 3 days to record. And unfortunately, unlike some similarly rushed albums like Led Zepplin and White Light/White Heat, this lack of time is wholly apparent to the listener.
That being said, the album does have a few standouts; “The Wolf” and “Te Awanga” both show that the idea of a musical savant like Connan paired with deadpan dad jokes can lead to a really fun track. The best part of the album is Ade’s often hilarious one-liners such as “Doesn’t anybody shag anymore?” and “work is shit, it’s like 45 pages but runs out on the 43rd page”
To be fully transparent, I used to be the biggest Connan Mockasin fan in the world. In high school I worshiped Forever Dolphin Love and watched every interview or demo he had produced up to that point. Connan is a very eccentric character, and I remember reading somewhere that he doesn’t listen to music besides the songs that he has made. It is easy to see how this led his early music to colorful, psychedelic ballads that only Connan could produce. But in the 10 years since these awesome tracks were made, the vibrant reds and greens that Connan once painted with have bled together to create a dull brown.