other titles...
See also...
- Everything Else
- Didn’t Know Why
- Sixes
- Snails
- Laundry
- Drifting Memory Station
- Deep Underneath
- Levitate a Little
- Yeekeys
- Coat Hangers
Tunng
Love You All Over Again
Full Time Hobby
Two decades in and the folktronica outfit are still leading the pack and leading us into the forest with every wobbling note, every sizzling string, every precious lyrical turn.
Their 20-year-old signature sound makes a warm return on Tunng’s eighth studio album: a winning amalgam of texture and melody, disconcerting imagery and shapeshifting production, predicated, Lindsay reveals, on a conscious reacquainting with the band’s first principles. “I went back to the first two albums just to listen to how we fused genres – things like Davy Graham, Pentangle and the Wicker Man soundtrack, all of which I was discovering back then, together with Expanding Records [the Shoreditch-based repository of soi-disant ‘beautiful electronic music’], whose studio space we shared. That was all going into the early records.
Over the years, Tunng’s sound has varied and twisted, but at the root there is always a flavour of what Sam and I made on that first album. Rather than searching for a new avenue we went back to what we used to do, which, after all this time, felt like it was a new avenue... Love You All Over Again is our way of coming full circle.”
A collection of spirited, mellifluous if ever-so-lightly eerie songs, it’s an album that, according to chief lyric writer Genders, reflects a sunnier latter-day disposition. “I’ve always been interested in the contrast between the pain and darkness of life on one hand and its magic and wonder on the other. These days, I guess I’m more drawn to the latter... Lyrically, it was very much stream of consciousness, and the songs have a lot of recurring themes: taking solace in nature, people, connections and the way life can be confusing and painful and so incredibly beautiful all at the same time.”
Whether it’s that ineffable esprit de corps, the meticulous studio craft or simply a turn of the karmic wheel, 'Love You All Over Again', with its folk-hymnal intimacy, its glimmering lights and long shadows, its unforced fusion of soul and machine, feels like a Tunng album for today – something of a familiar comfort in uncertain times and, equally, a record for the ages.
While, as Genders contents, this is not a pop album per se, it is, nonetheless, as melodically generous and lyrically bewitching as it is eccentric and startling, and in its highly detailed, genre-melding production, and in the preternaturally timeless, reverb-less blend of Genders’ and Jacobs’ voices (sporadically joined by Lindsay and the rest of the ensemble’s distinctive shanty choir), as captivating as anything in the band’s considerable canon.