The work of Tuxis Giant has experienced a turn towards the quiet since 2018’s Here Comes the Wolf. It’s a change we’ve followed through the intimate searching of Goldie and last year’s EP In Heaven which has deep roots in a period spent in a remote Vermont cabin during the initial stages of the pandemic. As though, in isolation, Matt O’Connor found the requisite peace and space to work through the most personal of questions, and Tuxis Giant’s music came to mirror this hushed introspection. An “unguarded exploration of identity and expectation in the face of failure and change,” as we put it previously, “prob[ing] the line between reality and dreams in search of a healthier, more fulfilling way of life.”
When writing about In Heaven, we described how the EP arose from a collection of sixteen tracks recorded at Big Nice Studio, with a potential double album shelved in favour of an EP/LP release. A year later, Tuxis Giant is preparing to put out resulting album The Old House, a sibling to In Heaven which both continues and expands upon its themes. With band members Eleanor Elektra (guitar, backing vocals, piano, synth) and James Steinberg (bass, drums, aux percussion) now joined by Michael Cormier-O’Leary (keys), the songs find Tuxis Giant offering a sonic representation of solitude in all of its nuance. The inherent safety in being removed from the wider world is challenged by an inevitable anxiety and loneliness, but there is another complicating factor too. Because the Vermont cabin that was the site of this isolation was where the first Tuxis Giant LP was written back in 2014, meaning the period was haunted not only by the uncertain future but also the all too familiar present. The result was a strangely nostalgic alienation. Or as O’Connor puts it: “Like visiting an old house you don’t belong in anymore.”
The latest single from the record and the song which closes out the release, ‘Daughter of the Pines’, serves as a kind of bookend together with opener ‘The Woods’. It’s a song that presents its surroundings as both hospitable and halfway menacing, where the illusion of familiarity is tested by strange sights and sounds within the Vermont wilderness. “Fisher cats are common up there, and their cries are horrific—like screaming children,” O’Connor explains. “I also remember watching blue smoke floating up the hill toward the house. Still don’t know what that was.”
The sound achieves a similar effect. There’s pleasure in returning to something familiar, and the instantly recognisable Tuxis Giant style offers the listener a sense of comfort. But across Elektra’s spectral harmonies and the needling unease which lurks beneath the arrangement, ‘Daughter of the Pines’ reveals its more sinister edge. The sense of things working against us, or else blind to our wishes and needs, and the terror such forces can bring. Because while this is ostensibly a view of one person in Vermont, the image is held as a mirror of a national picture. Where unknowable things are spreading their wings.
blue smoke
climbed up the hill
like water in reverse
it scared me shitless
I saw the devil’s wings
stretch over America
Album artwork by Sami Martasian, layout by Louis Roe