Tarantula AD - Book Of Sand (Kemado)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Sometimes it's the stories behind the craft that make the record that bit more special. Queer little tales abound about many classic releases. A personal favourite? "Polly Harvey ate nothing but potatoes, with occasional sauces, during the entire recording of her 'Rid of Me' album", according to Steve Albini. Makes sense. You could argue it's a rather heavy, stodgy piece of work. If it sounds like any foodstuff, 'Rid of Me' sounds like a potato.
Tarantula A.D. wanted a story. Apparently for this, their second outing in full length form, they spent the duration of the recording process in a wooden hut somewhere on the coast of the Pacific Ocean (which gives us quite a range of places to guess at as to where exactly they were) with - get this - the doors left opem. Hippies. The fact is however, it doesn't have any particular effect on the sound of the record. Even if there's not a fresh sea breeze soaking the tunes, you could at least expect a few waves crashing, or the noise of a seagull depositing on the snare drum for instance. Most of the time, this is just too mean to sound like the beach.
So why the tale? Well, whilst it doesn't give you much of an insight in to the sound, you do get a picture of the mindset you're dealing with here. Not the place for a verse-bridge-chorus affair to call home, that's for sure.
Allegations of pretension won't fall on deaf ears, but consider that to make something as impressive and not of the norm as 'Book of Sand', with its distain for conventional vocals and love of all things cut up in to different movements, it might just be a prerequisite that the creators in fact need to be ever so slightly conceited.
Maybe instead of pretentious we just mean clever. After all, to be able to write something almost wholly instrumental, like this, which maintains something about it worth devoting undivided attention to throughout is no mean feat. And when you're almost exclusively pedalling violent folk music, it's even more of an achievement.
If there's one thing you'll come away with at the end of all this, it's the collection of motifs that make up each third of 'The Century Trilogy'. Get used to them, learn to love them, as they'll rear their peculiar heads everywhere. One of the few pieces of recurring riff work anywhere here, the rest is a sprawling expanse of ideas, taking in drums as big as death, violins hammered in an attempt to out-brutal the sound of Dirty Three's Warren Ellis, and just occasionally, some people actually uttering some words.
The two in question are Coco Rosie's Sierra Casady and the inimitable Devendra Banhart, as if things needed to get any weirder. But compared to the viciousness of 'Book of Sand' at its loudest and unsettling abnormality at its most restrained, their cautious warbles and nervous hums seem a little slight. What this is really about is getting completely and utterly lost in sound rather than word. Occasionally, Tarantula A.D. get a little too lost in it for their own good, leaving us behind as they go off to investigate something round a corner. But mostly, you begin to think they left that door open so as you could step straight in and go right along with them.
Artists in this article: Tarantula AD
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