This is a record I was almost certain that I would not like at all. A very
long player by heady San Francisco band on a post-dork label, with an
opaque name and spacey sounding titles: all pretension and no fun makes for
a dull 74 minutes, especially when its distributed over a mere five
tracks. Fortunately for me and for you, this record knocked me flat on my
big fat ass. With each subsequent listen, my ass just keeps getting flatter.
True, the songs are long (the shortest clocks in at a whopping ten full
earth minutes, the longest at over twenty) and the music can be very spacey
and ambient. But its effects are accomplished with skill and care. This
is not another lazy, new age band hopping on the post-rock bandwagon with a
lot of bland noodling , cheap synths, and vibes. Despite the length of the
songs, they never get dull. Rather, they need that time and space to
evolve and develop through each of their stages.
At first I thought of Godspeed, You Black Emperor!, another band which
makes long, slowly shifting epics that rise to ecstatic heights and fall to
plunging depths. To be honest, there is a definite similarity in the
physicality of the music, yet Tarentel is working a whole other
vibe. Where Godspeed, You Black Emperor! overwhelms you with their passion
and madness, Tarentel reaches inside of you and turns you inside out.
"Steede Bonnet" starts with atmospheric hums and drones, muted plunks and
peeps. Out of this rises singing synths, simple arpeggios, sliding bass
and a frenetic, repetitive strum. They lay track upon track until it feels
as if you are completely enveloped in sound, like a bubble. Each
instrument bears you up in a way that keeps you afloat but perfectly
still. After about four minutes of this when the main melodic theme
emerges, it rises from the din like an epiphany, and then, finally, you
begin to rise with it.
It's not all transcendence and nice. In fact, each track is very
unique. "When We Almost Killed Ourselves" bursts open with sharp, jabbing
riffs of dissonant guitar lines, pummeling drums and some dark, rumbling
noise before breaking down into phased pulses and a more reflective tone,
provided clean guitars and spare bass. "Ursa Minor, Ursa Major" starts off
hyper and highly rhythmic, full of quick harmonics and layers of
tickity-tick percussion, laid on thick and fast until it crumbles into a
pile of huge, distorted guitar globs, which, in turn, slides back into a
laidback version of the opening segment and so forth and so forth. (OK, I
have one complaint: "Carl Sagan" is way too long. It sounds a bit like
Mogwai: pretty song builds in intensity to be overtaken by a huge roar of
noise. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but Mogwai would have executed
this in about half of the twenty-one minutes devoted to it on From Bone
to Satellite.)
The songs seem simple despite all of the instrumentation and
shifts. Perhaps simple is not the right word, but it feels like the right
one. That is not to say that the songs are obvious or predictable, but
that the music is never incomprehensible or too complex for its own
good. Tarentel is a very unique band in that they can balance their
ambition with effective composition and musicianship. The result is
calculated and difficult to achieve, but, like those who are best at what
they do, they make it feel natural and easy.
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