Anyone who has ever rolled a skateboard over a freshly paved road will come to the conclusion that Amelia Murray could hardly find a more fitting motif to illustrate her music than in the video clip for the song "A Little Uneasy" does: In a single long take, the New Zealand singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer skates between construction fences and palm trees through a deserted industrial area, falling back a little now and then, picking up some momentum and approaching the camera again, and one can read in her restrained smile that feeling of gentle euphoria that inevitably comes over you when the vibration of the rubber wheels is dampened by the smooth, buttery asphalt to such an extent that you actually feel like you are floating.

A feeling that also Amelia's Knows how to create music. Not only with "A Little Uneasy" , the previously released single, but also the other songs on "Morningside", the now released debut album by Amelia Murray's musical alter ego FAZERDAZE: Basically sparsely instrumented with guitar, bass, drum machine and restrained synths, their compositions are layered and condensed with the help of reverb and distortion to create a sound that is nevertheless so airy and dreamy that it always threatens to lift off the ground and carry the listener away. However, Amelia's Songs without exception feature melodies that are so firmly anchored in the ear canal that they neither drift away nor — like the stormy, with its sawing guitars, staggering between sweet melancholy and even sweeter exuberance "Friends" — can simply break free.

For this combination of 60s pop songwriting with the shoegazer and DIY aesthetics of the 90s, Amelia's equally "Fazerdaze" titled, self-published online first EP from numerous blogs and magazines to NME with all kinds of praise and attention that is not often given to home-grown productions from the other side of the world in the northern hemisphere.

Early laurels on which Amelia has by no means rested: FAZERDAZE, originally the product of a series of nightly bedroom sessions in tranquil Auckland, has long since matured from a home studio project into a band that has tirelessly gained stage experience over the past two years. On support tours with international artists such as the Unknown Mortal Orchestra,Connan Mockasin and Matt Corby followed in fall of 2016 one UK tour This development, which Amelia's unconditional belief in "learning by doing" and the more organic sound of "Morningside" has left its mark, is also featured in the video for the second single "Lucky Girl" — a song whose title says it all and which, with its reverb guitar aimed directly at the gut, flatters the listener through the band into the brain, where it recommends itself as the secret hit of this remarkable debut album. An album whose songs are all so-called "Grower" and which nevertheless - and this is what makes it so remarkable - proves to be chock-full of hits in the first run.

Amelia's Her warm, windswept voice and her beautiful, dreamy melodies may be the ideal companion for those places and moments that draw you to because melancholy feels so good there, but melancholy rarely had such a stirring lightness as with FAZERDAZE.

– Stephan Glietsch –