Marineville (2) – Penguins Ate My Chips

Penguins Ate My Chips is the 4th album from New Zealand alt-rock quartet MarineVille.

Featuring twelve songs, Penguins Ate My Chips continues the musical trajectory of MarineVille’s previous release, the 7” Face/Eat Toast – “no-wave keyboards, coarse and/or slashing guitar and those non-mawkish emo vocals that NZ is famous for…” (Byron Coley, The Wire).

Band members are seasoned figures in the NZ underground; Denise Roughan (bass, ex 3Ds), Greg Cairns (drums, ex Constant Pain), Jeremy Coubrough (keys, Tlaotlon), Mark Williams (vox/gtr, Bad Statistics, Cookie Brooklyn and the Crumbs, Baa Baa and the Black Sheep).

Sessions for Penguins Ate My Chips began in 2012, in the band’s Wellington warehouse, nestled in-between a local gang headquarters, an animal sanctuary and a meth-amphetamine crazed neighbour who threatened to beat up the band and was later arrested for driving around their local suburb on a child’s motorcycle whilst waving a sawn-off shotgun. In 2013 six further songs were recorded with Warner Emery, and later mixed and mastered in Dunedin by Forbes Williams (no relation).

Of the four members, Mark Williams is the sole surviving member from the bands original line up in 1999. Penguins marks a departure from the first MarineVille record in 2001 which was built around more open ended free form rock. Says Williams, “With the band members having busy lives, I decided to make this record a series of short, upbeat songs that we could hammer out live and not worry too much about the finesse. Several of the tracks didn’t have lyrics when we recorded them but I trusted us to knock out the tune and construct the rest of the song in the studio at home.”

Penguins Ate My Chips was initially released in 2015 on guitarist Mark Williams’ new tape/download imprint Burning Log. “After the collapse of physical release options elsewhere it seemed easier to start my own thing … I’d rather be writing music than writing emails to labels”. Since the release of the tape Zelle boss Arno Loeffler approached the band about a vinyl release. Says Loeffler,”When I first listened to the tape, I thought, wow, this is so good, someone just has to put Penguins out on vinyl! It could certainly be an instant Kiwi classic.”

MarineVille is currently an intermittent live project, with a fluid membership based around Williams and Cairns, plus Kirsten Van Newtown, Tenzin Mullin and Craig Monk. In lieu of extensive touring, the band have recently been working on a series of videos and have been playing gigs in Williams’ home town of Dunedin, where most of the band are now based.

The physical LP contains a download code for Penguins Ate My Chips and for the live album 15 Wax Tears, recorded in 2011 and originally released on cassette by Epic Sweep records in 2012.

Released March 15, 2017

All songs by MarineVille:
Mark Williams – guitar, vox
Greg Cairns – drums
Jeremy Coubrough – keyboard
Denise Roughan – bass, backing vox