Fresh Talent: The Accelerants

The name may sound like they would be more at home on the boy-racer circuit, but instead The Accelerants are heating up the Wellington music scene - and giving the city back some of its rock roots.

Guitarist and vocalist Marty Squire admits the name sounds "good and combustible", but says it was something that just came out of their collective heads. Like a number of other Wellington groups The Accelerants have recently changed their name (from Shining Path), but Marty says they are not jumping on some fashionable bandwagon in an attempt to distance themselves from an embarrassing past. He puts it succinctly: "It was just a matter of practicality. The old name we had was not ours to use." Shining Path, quite apart from anything else, is the name of an American rock band.

Marty and wife Kirsty (electric organ) make up one half of the Accelerants. The others are drummer Ricky Boyd and John Douglas on bass. The four got together after the break-up of Marty's former venture D-Super and, as Marty says, "... have been navigating the choppy waters of high finance recorded music ever since," first as Shining Path and now as The Accelerants.

While they fit somewhere into the rock'n'roll spectrum, and have been compared to '60s UK outfit The Kinks, Marty does not want to categorise their sound and says he would rather leave that up to people who are more qualified.

"I hope that perhaps we might have a broader field of reference than a lot of the two dollar shop 'rock and roll' bands that have appeared recently," quips Marty. The group, he says, is trying to focus on rhythm rather than volume. His disdain for budget bands is apparently right up there with his disdain for get-famous-quick schemes like American Idol.

He says that for The Accelerants, taking the world by storm, and doing so as quickly as possible, is not what is important.

"For us success is being able to make the music we want for a living." This means the group is not planning to do a Datsuns or D4, instead they're happy to plug away at the Wellington market and make sure the public in the capital knows who they are - at least for now.

The Accelerants have a 7" single coming out on Oz-based Infidelity Records in the next couple of months, and hope to release an album-length CD on Wildside in August.