Tall Dwarfs
Fifty Flavours Of Glue CD
Flying Nun. FNCD412.
by Keith McLachlan.
November 12, 1998.
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This was promised to be the glam
record and I was salivating over the thought of Chris Knox going over the
top in his portrayal of Bowie in flip-flops but poo there obviously are no
truth in advertising laws in New Zealand cause this sounds just like a
Tall Dwarfs record. Not that that is a crime in itself but since I had
expectations of another sort I guess it took me some time to reacclimate
myself to their charms. Actually it
took me around 8 seconds into the third song with Chris singing about life
as a piece of shit :)
It is funny, Alec is the one with all the ability and yet by power of his personality it is Chris who dominates things here. It seems a little more vitriolic than the last two records -- perhaps that is cause Chris is like 97 now and he is soon to be legitimately labeled as cranky.
There are some lovely ballads too though and one song has a great steel guitar line and the lyrics are fantastically odd, a sample being 'folded in two painted blue full of holes and hid below where the glow of the luminescent liquid from the throat of the lamb has been dammed by a wad of soiled clothing' and that is from a song that I mistook for a sensitive quiet one :)
A few of the loops sound as if they were recycled from the past but instead of getting that Beck record maybe you should get something with a bit of soul this time and pick up this slab of madness. Also the single that accompanies the record release is really clever too with this over-long but dreamy b-side that is perfect soundtrack to changing the time on your clocks the day after daylight-savings ends.
Tarnation
"There's Someone" 7" vinyl
4AD. tad 700.
by Keith McLachlan.
May 27, 1997.
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The working adjectives seem to have changed slightly when describing
Tarnation, it used to be that ethereal got a pretty fair workout in
Tarnation reviews, but it appears now that ethereal is due to be
replaced by smokey, as this new single finds them heading more towards
the Wilco side of the fence and away from the 4adness of their fine
debut record Gentle Creatures. The a-side is pretty much a rock
song, and the b-side is a slow burner that turns it up in the middle,
neither is haunting or all that interesting, kinda disappointing
actually.
Tarnation
Gentle Creatures CD
4ad. 9 45961-2.
by Scott Zimmerman.
December 31, 1995.
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What in Tarnation!? After I faintly caught the last bit of that rich,
glorious voice coming out of a "Rock Over London" tuned radio faintly
heard arising out of the kitchen of a Pembroke, Wales bed & breakfast,
I struggled to remember where I had heard it before. Oh yes, that was
Paula Frazer. That was a Tarnation song. Well, that was an easy
mystery to ...solve... No wait, couldn't have been! Not a possibility!
Self, what were you thinking? They're just an obscure little half-way
across the world San Francisco country band, certainly beyond the
scope of what the Rock Over London folks have possibly ever scoped
out previously. Not to mention it being an un-new song. After those
few seconds of thought on the matter, I forgot about it, trying not to
become distressed at my obvious mistake at identifying a song.
Then a couple of weeks later, after returning from my European vacation, I found sufficient proof that my identification was right. A new Tarnation album, lots of them, on sale. The label: 4AD. Ah! My long forgotten minor overseas trauma came back to me. It really was them on the radio! The secret was out!
Tarnation: a gem of a group. There's not much good about country, but what is good about country is what is good about Tarnation. The spooky, sentimental qualities of this group are unlike that of the popular country artists of the present that I almost universally loath. So, no, I am not trying to convert anybody to Garth Brooks. I'm not trying to convert anybody to new country hits. I'm just telling you about a new record by a band I like. And there ends the disclaimer.
The fifteen songs on this album for the most part flow by quite pleasantly. "Game of Broken Hearts" is the quiet, lo-fi number that begins the album. It features just Paula with her guitar, and it has a recorded-through-a-telephone quality, but that's not a bad thing. A certain mysterious, ravaged-by-time authenticity results from the recording technique. "Game of Broken Hearts" is one of about a half dozen songs on this album that were originally released on Tarnation's debut LP I'll Give You Something to Cry About.
The album then traverses through more fully instrumented songs of which most are new to me. Crying guitars are firmly in place, and Paula's vocals are heartbreaking, while not hokey. "The Hand" stands in most contrast to the rest of the album, having wonderful surf and western guitar overtones throughout. It's something you'd almost expect to be an instrumental, but then the vocals come, and that is, yes, quite grand.
Song fourteen "Stranger in the Mirror" is perhaps the track which hits most directly on country elements that challenge my tastes. It also represents a switch from female lead vocals to male lead. That's not bad in itself, however, as a strong finish is made with the Wendell lead "It's Not Easy," a track on which Paula does great sky reaching accompanying vocals, wonderfully summarizing the splendorous trip on which the album has taken you.
Teflon Monkey
Farming In Space ep CD
Placid Casual. plc04cd.
by Keith Mclachlan.
March 12, 2002.
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Welsh mothers, I am thinking they must be analagous to
the stage mothers here in Boulder, Colorado although
instead of sending their children to Heaven with a
perfect application of foundation, a perfect coiff, a
mini and a blunt force to the head they seem to
encourage their children to listen to Soft Machine
records and to play the acoustic guitar as if their
heads were balloons and their arms were bassoons.
Those wacky Welsh always seem to start young, Gorky's
first album came out when they were 3 and here Rhodri
Viney (who actually played on the last gorky's lp,
their 37th) displays his eighteen-year oldness with a
quiet sense of aplomb. All acoustic madness, one song
in Welsh, one instrumental and all gentle beyond the
pale, unfierce but offencive only with its
overabundant charms, a bit like Rodney Allen I think
if he had stopped his devotion at the shrine of Bragg
and instead decided that an 8th grader named John
Darnielle had already seen the future and was worth
pledging allegiance to. Perhaps Rhodri Viney is welsh
for Rodney Allen even?
the Third Eye Foundation
Ghost CD
Merge. MRG-119.
by Keith McLachlan.
May 26, 1997.
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I was lead to believe there are not any guitars on this album, which
might in fact make it a more fantastic record indeed. For omnipresent
is the familiar sounds of guitar feedback, so if Matt Elliot, the
chairman of the mysterious foundation, has found a new way of making
guitar feedback then more power to him cause this record is
stultifying.
In fact it is not much of a departure from his phenomenal debut lp Semtex, it has the unmistakable imprint of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless on it, but coupled with a more insistent almost junglist beat. This is still a homemade record though, so while Kevin Shields throws down 15 guitar tracks, Mr. Third Eye almost duplicates the feat with much less.
The song titles seem to suggest things are a tad bleak in the worldview of Third Eye Foundation with song titles like "I've Seen the Light and It's Dark" and "Corpses as Bedmates" however the music is not that heavy, it remains spacious and open. And the beat keeps it moving even while the atmosphere is sometimes made more sedate. This conflict in the music is always compelling and interesting.
Matt Elliot isn't a one hit wonder, so obvious is this that Dave Pearce better get off his butt because all of his Flying Saucer Attack cohorts (AMP, Movietone, Third Eye, etc.) are making brilliant records and soon the refrain will be "Dave who?"
Tompaulin
The Town And The City CD
Ugly Man. man 3.
by Keith Mclachlan.
January 6, 2002.
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This is a gorgeous record. But as I am lazy I will go
the easy route and do the "comparison" thing instead
of explaining just exactly why the record is
beautiful, so then please imagine if as a collective
Belle and Sebastian could be collected into the pus
inside a Sperm (haploid, of course, meaning you might
get Steve Jackson's voice and the drummer's
complexion) and the Gentle Waves were an ovum, and in
the case of Belle and Sebatian their little sperm is
swimming a bit crooked and instead of being nicely
sperm-shaped it resembles something more squid-like
and then imagine the Gentle egg in its perfectly
pristine, by chance a one in a zillion result of
meiosis containing only the best qualities of its
parent. Scene shifts to a petri dish and artificial
love and the fear of the next night possibly being one
hot minute in an autoclave creates a mood of desperate
passion that produces an offspring, slightly awkward
and certainly lacking for soul but fey and litling and
full of schoolboy angst and wistfulness and with a
future already traced out including weekly beat-downs
and stripey tee-shirts. The eyesight is a tragedy and
thick spectacles are needed and to cover the acne
scars a long floppy fringe of unkempt hair is
requisite. The voice comes out schizoid really, but
then with rock star parents prone to excess
alcoholizing and experimentation that only seem
appropriate) at times sounding a bit male though not
overly so and flat and at others perfectly chimed
through a feminine prism to exhort only the loveliest
dramas into the massive's inner ear. You have
Tompaulin then, they seem incapable of writing
anything other than beautiful, slow, folky pop songs,
they are the best Belle and Sebastian-derivative band
going, by a fair stretch, undeniably English and very
nearly magnificent. As noted there are two singers
and while the woman voice is poised and confident and
prepossessed with an innate connection to the music
the male voice, though English, strives for something
strange to say but a bit more Irish. Curious, by
listening it seems his childhood dream was a stint in
the Harvest Ministers of the Four of Us. But he isn't
all bad and when he gives the wheeze a rest and
putters around with a delicate little falsetto like on
'the boy hairdresser' he comes out sounding, well,
perfect and luckily the female rounds out most of the
tracks with perfect vocal accompaniment supplementing
inferior male and turns the album into one of the best
of last year.