Tender New Signs

Description

Tamaryn is reinventing herself, or at least shes trying. I call Brett Anderson from Suede my spirit animal, Tamaryns eponymous frontwoman told Amber Bravo of Fader with regard to her playlist for their Fader Mix series. Even though she said in another interview at MoMA PS1 last year, People compare us to My Bloody Valentine, the Cure, the Cocteau Twins. Those are my favorite bands so its a huge compliment, she eschewed the obvious influences this time around in favor of Clan of Xymox, John Cale, and Care, and Tender New Signs immediately puts distance between the band whose instrumental half is provided by Tamaryns longtime collaborator, producer, and guitarist Rex John Shelverton and the listener.

On their first record, 2010s The Waves, the title track began with Come down to the surface as Shelvertons whammy bar undulated with an almost sexual tension against Tamaryns warm, inviting siren song. Tenders Im Gone, on the other hand, lowers the temperature to crisply kicked drums and mere suggestions of reverb. Tamaryn taunts, Im gone/ Tell me when/ Im going in a voice alternating disarmingly between Harriet Wheelers saccharine coos and Victoria Legrands weathered incantations. This time, she demands the listener take note of her departure instead of go somewhere with her. Tamaryn sound different, further away than the abrasive ardor of their first album.

This studied separation extends to Shelverton, who finds that getting in the studio and taking things apart to adjust the subtleties of their sonics has been one of the biggest influences on Tamaryns work, according to Tamaryn. And Tender New Signs songs tend to break open along the quavering lines from Shelvertons 1964 Gibson: on Afterlight, her voice soars above the murmuring bass and picked chords that politely retreat into the background for the chorus, accentuating with restraint as opposed to volume. Exquisite album closer Violets in a Pool pulses with the barely discernible yet inexorable march of a tambourine, followed by Shelvertons busted fade-outs. The tails of reverb still fall into each other, but it sounds mathematically arranged, like colliding ripples in a pond. This is it, Tamaryn sings. The sound is moving in.

Its up to her to bring these elements together under her conceptual framework, which she does magnificently. As with most grand gestures, there are a few trip-ups namely, the distractingly mixed metaphors such as Shes a fool/ But times a thief but the grander ambitions of songs in which those appear remain undaunted. Tamaryn evokes Dum Dum Girls Dee Dee (also her partner in the short-lived side project Les Demoniaques, which appropriately covered the Jesus and Mary Chain) on Heavenly Bodies which revolves higher and higher until resolving itself in a single, beatific note; and While Youre Sleeping, Im Dreaming rattles with the unholy matrimony of Riders on the Storm and Bauhaus.

Tender New Signs slowly melting core still owes a sizable debt to The Waves. Stripped of the latters layers, however, they reveal the bands vulnerability as they move forward. Nothing really happens in No Exits, but nothing needs to: New nature/ No nature/ Like a gun/ Ive been holding on, Tamaryn admits, alone except for Shelvertons dripping guitars. They follow with Prizma, the albums lightest track. Its almost childlike in its simplicity, written in Dr. Seuss colors and thrumming with the muted pop of other relatively young bands like Papercuts or Crystal Stilts. These, along with Gardens picket fences of noise and the meandering Transcendent Blue, provide a welcome counterweight to the albums painfully thoughtful beginning and end.

Tamaryn are still steeped in their own personal brand of shoegaze, but now its an aesthetic choice they made as opposed to a label they were tagged with. She may as well have been talking about her new album when she said of her Fader mix, Its made from me to one person, whoever that one person might be. Tender New Signs makes the listener work a little harder within Tamaryns framework, but it rewards as much, if not more, than the walls of noise threatening to hem them in just a few years ago.

Reissue of the 2012 album.