Geneva AM's uplifting new album Pikipiki will make you want to dance and sing

Even if you don't know a word of te reo Māori, when Geneva AM speaks at the start of her new album Pikipiki her meaning is obvious. “Nau mai, haere mai”, she says, before a melody creeps into her voice.

Pikipiki does feel welcoming, gently ushering us in over warm synths and a steady kick drum. And the album proceeds in this vein, as uplifting as its title (which means ‘to climb’).

Geneva Alexander-Marsters (Ngāti Ruapani mai Waikaremoana, Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairoa, Aitutaki, Palmerston) is clearly interested in dance music as a vehicle for positivity, telling Under the Radar “now more than ever we need to unify and believe in our collective power to make positive change".

That’s not to say the album is all feel-good anthems. Often they’re complicated by wistful lyrics or the difference between Alexander-Marsters’ tone and her musical backing.

In ‘Urban Planning’, which pairs gentle chimes with a tongue-in-cheek title, she sings “The motorway was an awa [river]/ In the museum they put my waka/ I feel at home in the city/ I got my Tipuna [ancestors] with me”.

These are complicated sentiments, looking at the past with sadness and the present with acceptance. Near the end her voice drifts skyward on the line “I want to believe”.

Alexander-Marsters used to front SoccerPractise, who had a similar interest in electronic rhythms. With that band the beats tended toward complex and tangled, but here they’re generally stripped to the essentials.

There’s a lack of interest in quantisation (keeping everything strictly in time), so tracks like ‘Meet Again’ are free to let their different elements bump up against each other in a pleasantly human way.

On that track Alexander-Masters shows a deeper vocal delivery is well within her grasp, as she sings about a “dancefloor in heaven… up in the clouds”.

She suddenly drops into her speaking voice for the line “everybody on the dancefloor is famous... and they’re just really going for it, you know?”

It’s as if she’s suddenly addressing you, the listener, directly. It’s also very funny.

Similarly, the next track begins with her saying “For this next song I want your help. Wherever you are, if you’re listening at home, or you’ve got your earphones in, just give me a little “aue”… you’ll know it”

She launches into ‘Tutira Mai Ngā Iwi’, and sure enough it’s obvious when to chime in.

When the song switches from acapella to another dance-floor bop, she changes its main melody to one that’s darker and more impassioned, her delivery particularly powerful.

Two other tracks stand out simply because they’re so different. For ‘Toitū Te Tiriti’, she’s backed by a septet of string players called Ngā Whetu Ensemble and nothing else, for a rousing neo-classical piece.

Later, Ruby Walsh (Na Noise, Lips); Fiona Campbell (Guardian Singles, Coolies) and Lani Purkis (Elemeno P) provide backing for a garage rock version of ‘Pokarekare Ana’, which finds rousing new harmonies within a familiar classic.

The back half of Pikipiki stays electronic, dipping into drum n bass for its cover of 'Purea Nei' by Hirini Melbourne, and sturdy house for ‘Tipuna Rākau’.

That title translates as ‘ancestor tree’. Geneva-Marsters elaborated on her Substack it’s about being "the seeds of our ancestors”.

It contains some of her most uplifting melodies, with an accompanying video that further elucidates her aims with this project.

The album ends on the title track, with Samara Alofa, Hawkins, Rewi McLay, and Mara TK contributing vocals that merge together and climb higher with each bar, a perfect musical mirroring of Pikipiki’s title and intention.

A Nigerian singer based in London, Obongjayar is blessed with a mellifluous voice that slips between various styles over a varied selection of tracks. He enlisted some prestigious pop talent for his second album, including producers for Doja Cat and Kendrick Lamar, and while the album doesn’t quite achieve greatness, a handful of songs do.

Pairing fuzzed-out guitars with mellow singing is a time-honoured tradition, and one of the current leading exponents is Will Anderson, who leads Hotline TNT. His song craft and soft vocal tone are in great form on their third album, but the most enjoyable aspect is those blissful layers of blown-out six-strings.

Listen to Tony Stamp play more tracks from Pikipiki on Music 101 on Saturday 16 August.