Opposite Sex Hamlet

Two albums in, with the link between each moment of slurring spoken word, piano ballad, and discordant “fuck you” song becoming less and less clear, we all ought to be asking how, in 2016, Dunedin is still spewing out bands as strange as Opposite Sex. Is it all the native psilocybin? The isolation? The musical ‘legacy’? Strange feelings come out in strange ways, as tends to happen in a city of miserable winter, depression, and a uni populace crawling with the sorts of fucking jocks about whom the songs basically write themselves. That’s because, in spite of the patented ‘sound’ of their city, the real Dunedin influence on Opposite Sex is an ideology. There’s punk, of course, as usual, but the bizarro lens of Xpressway—“the Dunedin label”—what with its Marxist dues and DIY purism, is the band’s heftiest inheritance thanks to how many of their peers come from this older, noisy school. It only helped their underground reputation that certain big-name ex-members of the Fall and the Pastels wound up being big fans of this obscure New Zealand band. Whichever way you have ‘em Opposite Sex have already left a permanent impression within today’s younger underground generation. Besides that one fact, there aren’t many unifying features of a band so scattered, but so brilliantly chaotic, and by no means confused. But that’s just what you get from a band with so much uncontrollable inspiration, with imagination that’s like not unlike mashing one’s hands against the keyboard of existence and expecting Shakespeare to come out. Judging by Hamlet, it’s just funny when it sort of does.