Boise/Los Angeles band Tamra first came to our attention last month with single ‘Omens, Silos‘. The tracks was the introduction to their upcoming debut EP Light Reading, and blended “early 00s college favourites with Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison and a turbulent undercurrent of Midwest emo.” The result was indicative of the forthcoming release, channelling a particular American sprawl in the way it sounded “both gloomy and not, full of inelegant beauty like a deserted stripmall under a bruised and stormy sky.”
Such a style is intrinsic to the Tamra aesthetic. Consisting of Kenton Freemuth (vocals, guitar), Andrew Freemuth (guitar), Ethan Bjornsen (bass) and Chris Clayton (drums), the outfit offer a vision of the US that’s both lonely and glaring. A world of commercials and fluorescent signs, garbage dumps and chemical waste, an environment tamed but no less expansive within which masses of people waste time and attempt to square what they want with what they have. A world ugly and often incoherent yet charged with a shimmering energy.
Latest track ‘Flood’ draws the listener further into this milieu. A song in which poison and tonic flow through the same vessels, and heaviness and lightness marble into something which far exceeds the barely two minute runtime. Distortion peels at the edges, kept at bay only by the intensity of the impassioned vocals.
Medicine in the waterway
Infection in that same vein
Drainage out in the halls
Fades in to clouds and aerosols
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Light Reading will be released later this year.