The Washington DC-based bedroom pop project Tall Friend are back with a new EP, Tawl Friend. The release opens with ‘Termites’, a slow lo-fi pop song which will doubtless appeal to fans of the likes of CBMC. The track trips through with beguiling rhythm, all the while detailing a pretty macabre entomological analogy for love:
“i’ll become a big oak tree and
let the beetles eat their way through me and
when they’re done you’ll carve your name
‘cause nothing can be like it was
before i met you and i felt your touch
(you laid your eggs in my stomach) “
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=83168036 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=602408087]
“You can belong anywhere effortlessly like a sharpie mark or a cockroach”, begins ‘cockroach’, a song about about the constant need for attention and affirmation, about missing everyone in your life and trying to reconnect. ‘c’ is again suffused with a quiet sense of loneliness and isolation, this time swapping out the insect references in favour of avian metaphors, “we are feathered friends with different calls / I just can’t seem to decipher yours / and while I dream of your mouth/ you dream of heading south for the winter”.
‘suf’ is almost in slow motion, the vocals mumbled and sometimes barely there at all, before it takes off at the half way mark and things gain a little intensity, a song marked by the killer (quite literally) opening line of “all my stories involve dead animals”. The EP’s finale, ‘guts’, is about telling your deepest secrets to someone and feeling like “more and more of a monster, of a scary thing to harbour from”, about that irrational feeling of impurity about things that have happened in the past, and ultimately, about the all-redeeming qualities of friendship.
Get Tawl Friend on a name-your-price basis from the Tall Friend Bandcamp page.