"At this very moment in time, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, someone is creating something out of nothing. If only we knew what it was!"
- Ronald P. Vincent

The distance and the method of any journey are, of course, irrelevant. Straitjacket Fits are the first to acknowledge that we're as near to heaven by sea as by land. It's all a matter of perspective. Perhaps no band has ever been more undeservedly overlooked or criminally misspelt than Straitjacket Fits (no "gh," ever). Formed in the unlikely hotbed of Dunedin, New Zealand, Straitjacket Fits has travelled a long way to pursue its mangled pop dream over a succession of sometimes astonishing records - of which the new album, Blow, is the latest and greatest.

Guitarist, singer, songwriter and part-time columnist Shayne Carter formed Straitjacket Fits in 1987, after his two previous outfits, Bored Games and The Doublehappys, came and went without making any impression outside the restricting confines of New Zealand. For his new venture, Carter teamed up with guitarist and songwriter Andrew Brough and the thundering rhythm section of bassist David Wood and drummer/artworker John Collie and it soon became clear that all four had tripped over a treasure chest.

When the Australian music weekly On The Street called Straitjacket Fits' 1987 EP, Life In One Chord, "Arguably the greatest debut single of all time," they weren't taking liberties with the truth. Rock can only be defined by its limitations and the EP's four tracks pushed guitar pop's boundaries into the twilight zone in just 21 minutes 34 seconds. It took the likes of bands like Ride and Chapterhouse over two years to begin to catch Straitjacket's vapor trail.

A bright-spangled album titled Hail on the legendary New Zealand label Flying Nun swiftly followed in '88, yet although it contained a blistering version of Leonard Cohen's "So Long Marianne," the band was disappointed with their LP debut. Their live performances were often favorably compared to the dying seconds of the four horsemen of the apocalypse's polo match, yet during the recording, something had got lost between desk and disc. The band's trademarked hot-wired guitars and vocal interplay were all present and correct, yet Hail sounded like a bunch of great songs struggling to get out. The album itself struggled to get a U.S. release and was eventually picked up by Rough Trade. The band spent the next 12 months touring and collecting glowing reviews.

It looked as though Straitjacket Fits could do no wrong as Arista swooped to sign the band thru Flying Nun in 1991. In June, they released their second album, Melt, to rave reviews. Rolling Stone described the album as "a heady walk in the mountains, with choruses expanding like vistas and key changes that feel like the wind shifting direction," and every music magazine in the country fell over backwards to praise Melt's caustic vision, brooding subtlety and arsenic-tinted melodies. In fact, the only people who seemed disappointed with it was the band themselves, mainly because they were already dreaming of their next move.

The band was hired to support The La's on tour in the U.S., which turned out to be as pleasurable as having root-canal dental work without an anesthetic. The more Shayne and Co. blew the Liverpool band off the stage, the more uncomfortable things became. Just to round off a perfect year, Brough left the band, taking his Sixties pop sensibilities with him.

Straitjacket Fits decided to re-establish themselves as a three-piece. They brought in longtime friend Mark Petersen to fill the guitar gaps when the band opened for My Bloody Valentine on an Australian tour. A terrible beauty was born: Petersen fit in perfectly and was formerly adopted by the band just before the moody, swirling Done EP. As Carter explained at the time, "We needed something that provided a punctuation mark between albums that's more of an exclamation mark than a question mark."

By 1992, the 28-year-old singer decided the only way forward for the band's distinctive and uncompromising guitar pop was to make hand grenades and disguise them as Easter eggs. The new album, Blow, was recorded in Los Angeles in January '93. It's designed for people who understand the difference between rapture and rupture.

Straitjacket Fits finally took so many people's suggestions and recorded it live - a more relaxed approach encouraged by producer Paul Fox, whose most recent work includes 10,000 Maniacs and the Sugarcubes. By Carter's own admission, the songs are more focussed and more literal than ever before, yet are still meant to jab people "with an IQ above room temperature." The band also sounds closer to equalling their scalding live intensity.

"After the pot-speckled over-introspections of the last album, this one's breaking free," Shayne explains. "We were gonna call it Unafraid Of Pop (And Rock), but decided Blow was heaps better. After Hail and Melt, not only do we have another four-letter title with the requisite, consistently 'shifty' I, but - cheap and nasty connotations about sex and drugs aside - it's a term with a whole bunch of easily apt associations. Blow, like the gentlest whisper in your ear, like an almighty smack around the head...the act of moving something or someone with currents of air, a sense of combustibility, a stroke, a blast."

Indeed, Straitjacket Fits has created an album that explodes with surprises. From the formidable guitar blizzard of "Cat Inna Can," to the tongue-tangled feedback of "Brother's Keeper," it's an album that even the band's sternest critic, Shayne Carter, can live with. Now they're here to collect the mineral rights. In early '92, the usually hard-to-impress British music magazine Melody Maker said that, on their night, "Straitjacket Fits is the weirdest guitar band in the world: it's also the best." Blow and the band's forthcoming '93 U.S. tour should throw further light on the fundamental truth of this statement, or as Shayne put it, "Open up and breathe deep World and be prepared to swallow."