Heady blend

Tom Scott goes back to his tribe with another album of Home Brew, following a tour showing the love for his brand of hip-hop is still there.

- RUSSELL BROWN

It's Friday night at the Powerstation and the urge to party is so strong you can taste it. More than one tribe of Auckland is represented in the heaving crowd and most of them aren't fancy people. They're the ones who bought their tickets on the day it was announced that Home Brew would be playing in their home town for the first time in years. The show sold out that same day and the air of expectation is manic.

Home Brew is the group Tom Scott formed in Avondale in 2006 and the scene of various crimes. The band's self-titled debut album was released in 2012 and became the first local hip-hop album to top the national charts since Scribe's The Crusader, nearly a decade before. A four-LP vinyl version released in 2014 by a European label now changes hands for more than $700, and a 2023 re-release - the premise for the tour that concluded at the Powerstation at the end of October - is selling.

By the time Home Brew came out, the band was already scattering and Scott had begun on a series of other projects - most notably, Avantdale Bowling Club, whose ambitious, jazzy 2018 debut album earned Scott the Taite Music Prize, a Silver Scroll, the Album of the Year award and a degree of respectability that might once have seemed unlikely. The vivid Friday Night at the Liquor Store, from the follow-up album Trees, was a Silver Scrolls finalist this year. But it's Home Brew the people are here for tonight.

The first few songs - Alcoholic, Benefit, Yellow Snot Funk - are tales of misspent youth and a release for the raging energy in the room. It's not unlike the occasional 45-minute festival sets the band has reconvened to play over the years.