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| Entertainingly shelved under the name “Laptop Folk,” Tunng's debut album munges together “quirky” electronics and traditional folk sensibilities. |
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It's easy to be prejudiced against this Odd Couple pairing emerging from middle England obscurity. Electronica's digital waves have been seeping into other genres to create hybrids with varying success (think hip hop, for example, think Prefuse 73). So to hear folk strains poured through the electronic equipment strainer could result in a “so what?” response; indifference – yet another unnecessary or improbable mixture. Fortunately This Is... doesn't always descend into a musical recess of folk-accompanied-by-blips, or electronica-by-numbers.
Tunng create clouds of wistfulness from the opener. Gentle songs like "Mother's Daughter” and “Beautiful And Light” ease you into the sound, in which the duo sensibly limit themselves to acoustic guitar-driven songs, textured with electronic rhythms and backgrounds. That they're sensitive to not overstepping is partly why they manage to often pull off this unlikely pairing. When “Kinky Vans” starts, with its rather 'difficult' chopped electronics, the listener is (or should be) already convinced. The variance of the songs here, from the strong-sounding folk tradition found in “Fair Doreen” to the more obscure lyrical departures such as “Code Breaker," sustain interest (or at least, my interest, as someone not-that-familiar with folk).
But for every interesting paddle in interesting musical waters, there are some meanderings. It sounds rather tired and aimless at times, like “Out The Window With The Window” and “People Folk,” the former suffering from sounding suspiciously like instrumental filler material, the latter just being a plain boring refrain.
Is it life-changing? No, not really. Although This Is... provides an interesting-enough listen, several tracks leave no impact because Tunng seem scared to leave the solid territory they carve out on the album's strongest pieces. Listening to this as an electronica or folk album simply doesn't provide enough material to satiate musical appetites. As a result Tunng are in dangerous territory: they combine folk and electronica at the expense of both. |
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| Stuart Reeves - 6/10 |
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