This is Tunng’s ninth album, their first in five years, and marks their 20th anniversary by consciously going full circle to the gentle sound sculpture and folk melody of their earliest work. It is also thrown into fascinating relief by arriving just as the world is reeling from the loss of David Lynch.
Their aesthetic has rarely if ever been compared to his – perhaps because they are so firmly rooted in a very English pastoral, while he has always been about wide-horizons Americana – but in fact listening to this record as social media is flooded with his pronouncements and creations, it becomes abundantly clear that they are tapped into a very similar wellspring to him.
From the start, Tunng always operated in a world of the uncanny. Their ability to blur digital processing, glitch and crackle with the most refined of acoustic programming without making it seem like one was imposed on the other created the scaffolding for this, and their lyrics likewise telescoped anachronisms together, existing in a world where the internet, old wireless signals and magic spells to transform into hares all functioned together. In this dreamspace, warm-heartedness, intimacy, magic, loss, death and fear all coexist, flowing together according to deeply idiosyncratic internal logic, but making sense because – just as Lynch is a master of filmic conventions – Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders of Tunng are worldclass songwriters in the most classic sense.
All of that is as present as ever here. The glitches, the old paternalist voices of TV crackling through the ether, the circling pianos and guitars, the vocal interplay, and the instant earworm melodies take you into the same never-ending dream as began on 2005’s Mother's Daughter and Other Songs. There are instrumentals like “Drifting Memory Station” that make explicit that sense of signals going back and forth in time as shortwave radio tones swoop over an “Albatross” like see-saw pattern and the closing “Coat Hanger” which falls apart and fades into the shadow. There are songs like the single “Everything Else” that are instantly joyous, and plenty else that’s haunting, even troubling – but above all, just as with the life’s work of David Lynch, Tunng remain, as they’ve always been, about love. Love for the world in all its weirdness. That is the wellspring, and it is clearly a source of eternal inspiration as they’re as great now as they’ve ever been.
Listen to "Everything Else":
