The Clean – Vehicle

When people talk about New Zealand’s contribution to independent music, the conversation always circles back to Flying Nun Records and the Dunedin Sound. At the heart of it all were The Clean, a group whose approach to songwriting and recording redefined what a band could get away with on tape. Their 1990 debut full length Vehicle remains one of the most enduring examples of how lo fidelity recording can be a strength rather than a weakness.

The album does not so much begin as stumble into being. “Drawing to a Hole” sets the tone with wiry guitars, loose drumming and David Kilgour’s dry, unfussy vocal. The performance sounds precarious but never careless. Songs such as “Diamond Shine” and “Getting Older” could almost be described as pop, but only if you stretch the definition to include songs that lurch sideways as often as they move forward. Nothing about Vehicle is polished, yet almost everything about it is memorable.

The production is as bare as it gets. Amps buzz, sticks rattle, vocals hover just above the mix. What might be dismissed elsewhere as mistakes become part of the texture here. The looseness is integral to the sound. It captures not just the songs but the process of making them, with all the risk and humour that comes from working quickly and instinctively. That is why Vehicle does not sound like slacker rock. It is not laziness, it is intuition — sharp ideas carried out without unnecessary interference.

The Clean have often been compared to The Velvet Underground, but the comparison only goes so far. Where the New York group were rooted in art and subversion, The Clean sound closer to a garage down the street, windows open, friends dropping by, songs falling into place in the moment. If Sonic Youth had grown up on the South Island rather than downtown Manhattan the results might have had something of this spirit.

What makes Vehicle significant is not simply the sound but the influence. You can hear its fingerprints in Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Sebadoh and countless others who embraced imperfection as part of the craft. The Clean did not invent the idea, but they showed how far you could take it. The air in the room, the weather outside, the laughter in the background — all of it remains present on the record. It is music that never tries to hide the people making it.

More than thirty years on Vehicle has not lost its charm. It still sounds like freedom, unvarnished and unafraid. For anyone raised on tidy production values it can be a shock, but once you tune in to its world the appeal is obvious. This is not about fixing what is broken. It is about trusting that the flaws are where the real life sits.