As pre-requisites to becoming darlings of the high-brow online music press, having the sister of Max Tundra among your ranks certainly helps, as does a back catalogue of well-regarded folktronica and acid-singed indie. And a composer fresh back from a recent similarly cultivated excursion with Laura Marling together as Lump doesn’t do any harm either. Billed as the band’s most electronic leaning record to date, Songs You Make At Night sees the original full line-up of Tunng reunite for the first time since 2007’s Good Arrows. Those expecting Good Arrows Mk 2 or a return to the experimental chirpiness of 2010’s …And Then We Saw Land will be disappointed, although fans of the more recent Turbines may see Songs You Make At Night as a natural next step. Essentially a concept album based around the characters from 2006’s Comments From The Inner Chorus brought up to date, the themes on the band’s sixth record will unfortunately sound hackneyed and unimaginative while the instrumentation relies more on off-the-shelf FX and over-familiar MOOG analogues than the careful mix of trad stylings and innovative quirks on previous records.
The traditional arrangements on highlight ‘Evaporate’, with added instrumentation (whistles and pumps, and a clarinet), is the closest they get to common or garden Neutral Milk Hotel and the highs of previous records. ‘Crow’ is easily the standout track though, in fact one of my tracks of the year so far. As it ebbs and flows between gentle electronica and simple percussive guitar the nursery rhyme-like lyrics are genuinely poignant. Such a shame then that the rest of this record is so bland and overproduced. Take ‘Like Water’, lightly psychedelic, the structure of the track and the quaint but non-rhotic delivery of the lyrics (and on many of the other tracks) are a marked move away from the folk genre and style into a twee electronica that feels amateurish and claustrophobic.
Songs You Make At Night is music for cornflake cafes and road bike clubs. It’s homogenised indie-folk consciously trying to be cool. There is nothing authentic to tracks like ‘Nobody Here’ where the simple nylon-stringed guitar part is swamped by those MOOG synths and samples flinchingly high in the mix, and there is no cohesion or obvious attempt to intertwine the two aspects of the track. ‘Dark Heart’ and ‘Battlefront’ sound like discarded soundcards from a pre-modern games console. And it’s all so English, like outtakes from Blur’s Parklife sessions. Far from being a folk album with synthesised embellishments, this is a record stuffed full of obvious synth arpeggios and gradations highlighting the lack of traditional melodies that made the band’s previous work such a delight. Liberal use of film recordings and sparse electronic samples are obvious and overused by everyone from the remix revolution of the 90s to Gorillaz and even the last Bastille album.
There is little else here to warrant much further attention, although on third or fourth listen the understated chorus of ‘Sleepwalking’ will start to familiarise itself but, overall, by attempting to explore the very outer limits of their folktronica universe Tunng have merely popped into a passing electronic one. Disappointing.
Songs You Make At Night is out on 24th August through Full Time Hobby.
