09 Mar 2008
And how do you like your guitars Madame/Sir? Tangled, you say? Slightly distorted and yet not metallic, a little grungy but also complicated and mercurial, melodic with an ambiguous mood that can produce feel-good excitement and yet edgy, never too happy or self-satisfied? Ah yes, so you quite like Sonic Youth but are put off by the atonality and experimental side. Then may I recommend the new Tall Firs album, you’ll find it to be made by the Americans, naturally, and influenced by the burgeoning free folk movement, but thankfully with nary a Devandra Banhart in sight.
At first hearing you probably wouldn’t say particularly its folky, but listen to the lyrics- it’s narrative reportage from the bars and squats of alternative North America, complete with hippies, punks and “acid-crazed teenage tweak-outs”. The words aren’t overly verbose but certainly evocative, taut, a world weary survey, taking stock of an altogether too familiar past and present and wondering what, if anything, the future holds. The endless days of youth are fading, living always for the present, the next party, the next hit, but we’re getting weary. Is that all there is? “We’re not too old to get drunk but we’re too old now to die young” they drawl on the fantastic album opener Messed Up, the repeated title lyric making a resigned yet somehow triumphant chorus.
All this is delivered in a conversational throaty vocal style that works well with the spiralling guitar interplay of Television-esque dizzy euphoric builds and squalls of freefalling treble atonality. This, the second album, also boasts a “new, non-drowsy formula” in the form of newly drafted drummer Ryan Sawyer providing welcome drum-rolling jazzy backbone to the free-flowing arrangements, of course remembering to keep it loose, man.
Warriors is another standout, a night-out downtown punctuated by a drunken brawl complete with jazzy drumming and crescendos a go-go. Yes its an effective evocation of that film the Warriors, complete with menace and interruptions, tense murmurings of “We were the only ones, and then we gained some” (that by virtue of the accent and backdrop sound ace), though of course all this is transplanted from a hip-hop inflected Bronx to nearer the vicinity of the bearded bottled-beer drinking arty districts. After this the album loses its way slightly, a couple of meandering country-fried tracks that are pleasant enough but not particularly attention grabbing, but they’re soon back to arresting urgency with Hippies and the woozily grandiose end-of-the night finale Secrets and Lies. All in all 36 minutes well spent, and I believe the tip is included in the album price.
http://playlouder.com:80/content/165...d-to-die-young