Tunng - 'Mother's Daughter & Other Songs' (Static Caravan)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Some people just can't hold themselves back. Pioneers, we call them. But there are people trying things for the sake of being oddball and then others who seem to do this kind of lark because they're compelled to do so, without any thought for their own kooky credibility. People like Tunng, who take folk music as their starting-point, but realise that most contemporary folk struggles to not be woefully over-familiar. They realise there's a very interesting sonic world out there. The mission to kill boredom doesn't have to be a particularly raucous one.
Soft on the edges as it may be, there's cause for proper excitement here. Opening track 'Mother's Daughter' is enchanting, the kind of thing that would be perfectly nice if it maintained the sparse acoustic setting it was doubtless born in but is even better for the amount of weird gubbins Tunng deem fit to slap all over it, odd vocal samples and bizarre pulsing beats, like what would happen if Aphex Twin produced the next Super Furry Animals album. Now, there's a thought...
But what stops the title of this little opus being true is the equally beguiling nature of these so-called 'other songs'. Granted, variation in the dynamics doesn't seem to be a key weapon to their arsenal but they start from such a progressive point anyway that there's no question of the consistency and persistent intrigue of their attack. Centrepiece 'Tale From Black' manages to get fingers tapping at the same time as being ever so slightly epic, whereas 'Song of the Sea' is the kind of thing Gomez were writing way back when they could do no wrong. Except they didn't have percussion akin to a small group of people whacking their laps and making faint clucking noises in their mouths. Perhaps that's where it all went wrong. 'Fair Down' revisits proper folk themes like Satan and proper folk names like Doreen, but it's a brief return home. The preceding 'Kinky Vans', for example, sounds like your copy of Nick Drake's 'Five Leaves Left' is skipping in a way you find hugely enjoyable.
They can make momentary crashing, bleeping and splatting noises all through an instrumental track of the highest melody and somehow it doesn't sound either ridiculous or like they're trying very hard to be clever. The ideas are abound because Tunng are very clever - there's no need to try. The melodies are as shrewd as the bleeping, but as well as having a whole selection of sonic subtleties to get your head around once the actual tunes are ingrained in you enough that you can recite them to yourself independent of the record, lyrically, it stands up to a proper pondering also. By the time you've both figured out where the next pulsing beat that sounds like a spark plug comes and unravelled the cryptic mysteries of the text, it'll have been so long since you actually paid attention to the charmingly catchy songs themselves that they'll take on yet another lease of life.
A perpetually favourable record, perhaps?
Artists in this article: Tinariwen, Tunng
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