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The Mint Chicks

Excellent post-punk band taking in equal measures of Voidoids style angular guitar and Blood Brothers style furious hardcore screaming and breakbeat crunch. A talented 4-piece with an excellent grounding in music production, they were snapped up by Flying Nun Records after building a strong live reputation in auckland during 2002-3. ‘licking letters’ is the first single, coming from the break-through Octagon, Octagon, Octagon Ep, and is a jerky, stop-start ripper, few bands have shown such intensity committed to plastic.

With the Nielson brothers Ruban (Guitar) and Kody (Vocals), Michael Logie (Bass) and Paul Roper (Drums), they were a very free-roaming band. Kody is a lively frontman, dancing like a man possessed, jumping round the stage, and fiddling with an on-stage effects unit, while the band falls perfectly in place for all their quick-cutting squeels and explosions of sound. They followed up the debut with an equally spastic sophmore EP Anti-Tiger – repeating an earlier new-wave inflected single. The band have toured Australia and even made the big jump to a British tour, accumulating a stack of the usual NME/Spin etc hype.

Their much-anticipated full-length debut seemed like a bit of a flattening out for the group. After receiving an absolute avalanche of attention (thanks to a bit of biffo during the groups South By South-West performance in Austin Texas, and thrilling big day out crowds with acrobatics and a little bit of chainsaw welding; Fuck The Golden Youth mostly revisited their earlier material, though with new noisier, but less jagged versions of the earlier songs, plus a couple well received singles (‘Opium Of The People’ was a highlight).
the group have since retreated a litte, with side-projects floating about while the group prepare their sophmoric album.

August 2006 saw the release of Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!, which contained poppy singles ‘Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!’, ‘Walking Off a Cliff Again’ and ‘She’s Back On Crack’, indicating a new direction and ambition from the group. As Kody and Ruben are dual-citizens of NZ and the United States, the brothers spent a the next couple years living in both Auckland and Portland, Oregon. Mike Logie left the group during 2008 (though he did appear during later performances), and the groups success continue, with album Screens being the catalyst. However in 2010 the group finally decided to dissolve, with Mike Logie surfacing in a solo capacity as F in Math (and later joining Die! Die! Die!, Ruben Neilson in US-based group Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Kody Neilson forming Opossom alongside Bic Runga (Mike Logie later joined as bassist).

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