Avon Dads have found one of punk’s most renewable resources: the small indignities of ordinary life. Straightlining is a two-song, five-minute examination of situations too insignificant to inspire conventional protest music but too irritating to pass through the nervous system unnoticed. One song concerns the deadening ritual of completing an online customer survey; the other concerns the tiny infractions, private delusions and mobile territorial behavior of Christchurch drivers. Together they resemble a pocket-sized concept record about negotiating with systems, whether the system is asking how satisfied you are or requesting that you refrain from changing lanes while turning.
“Straightlining” takes its name from the survey-research term for selecting the same response repeatedly rather than considering each question. Avon Dads do something clever with that idea: instead of merely describing the behavior, they turn the questionnaire itself into the lyric. Water supplier, financial adviser, internet provider and dehumidifier are subjected to the same increasingly suspicious choices, while “Very satisfied,” “Satisfied” and “Somewhat satisfied” begin circulating like the vocabulary of a malfunctioning civilization. The repeated answers become both chorus and rhythm. Bureaucratic language, designed to collect information without possessing a personality of its own, is forced to sing.
At 144 beats per minute, the song moves with considerably more enthusiasm than anyone has ever brought to a supermarket-voucher survey. James Chalmers’ bass and vocal delivery keep the questions marching forward, Hollan Brabet’s drums give the procedure its compulsory momentum, and Ben Dodd’s guitar supplies the nervous electrical activity around it. Dodd also engineered and mixed the recording, and the trio arrangement benefits from knowing exactly how little decoration it requires. It is lean, brisk guitar music in which repetition does not flatten the joke but sharpens it. By the time the song asks whether the listener would recommend the band to a friend and answers its own question with an emphatic “Absolutely Not,” the customer-service form has become a crowd chant.
“M.T.O. (Minor Traffic Offences)” relocates that same dry observational instinct from the computer screen to the road. The narrator vapes while overtaking, leaves the headlights on high beam, hits the bumps at thirty-five, toots at horses and maintains that he obeys only the laws of physics. It is not a grand outlaw fantasy. It is the heroic self-image of someone whose rebellion consists of slightly improper lane discipline. That modest scale makes the song work. Avon Dads understand that modern life contains thousands of little stages upon which people briefly cast themselves as villains, renegades, experts or sovereign citizens, usually while operating a moderately priced car.
The two songs form an unexpectedly neat pair. “Straightlining” concerns refusing to give a system the thoughtful attention it requests; “M.T.O.” concerns refusing to give a system the orderly behavior it requests. One person clicks the same box all the way down. Another treats the road code as advisory literature. Both are minor acts of noncompliance, and both are followed by the suspicion that the rebel may actually be a fool. Avon Dads preserve that ambiguity rather than delivering a moral. Their characters are funny because they are recognizable, not because the band stands at a safe distance and sneers at them.
This economical humor belongs naturally within the Christchurch community surrounding Melted Ice Cream, a label and music collective that has spent years documenting how much personality can accumulate around local bands, shared personnel, homemade recordings and seemingly disposable ideas. Chalmers, Dodd and Brabet had already played together in Doctors and BnP before forming Avon Dads, while Dodd’s wider trail passes through groups including Kool Aid, Salad Boys and the Lonely Harris Club. Straightlining therefore is not an isolated novelty single. It comes from musicians experienced in the peculiar Christchurch art of making casually presented guitar music whose construction is far more deliberate than its shrugging surface suggests.
The trio’s previous release, egg, was recorded in 2017 and finally emerged in 2020. Five years later, Straightlining sounds less interested in expanding the band’s scale than in refining its aim. Every phrase has a job, every repetition earns another laugh, and both songs leave before their premises can become sketches stretched beyond their natural dimensions. This is pop miniaturism with the timing of a good cartoon: establish the environment, introduce one ridiculous human tendency, accelerate it until it becomes music, then disappear through a hole in the wall.
Anyone familiar with Christchurch roads, local radio, supermarket surveys or the musicians’ other bands may hear additional details hiding inside these five minutes. That local knowledge would be welcome. For everyone else, Straightlining still works as a compact report from the international republic of low-level irritation, where forms remain unfinished, indicators are optional, and absolutely nobody would recommend us to a friend.
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