Tamaryn – The Waves

Tamaryn - The Waves

Scanning over the PR blurb for Tamaryn’s first release, the words ‘sun-stricken’, ‘dream-pop’ and ‘San Francisco’ hit me round the face with a bluntly unimaginative thud. Here’s what I thought: Best Coast release their California recorded, reverb injected, Pitchfork Best New Music’d summer debut, and labels x, y and z follow swiftly behind with their en vogue doppelgangers. How very cynical of me. Luckily, there’s more to it than all that.

Where the debut mentioned bottles that sunlight-through-palm-trees summer vacation feeling, The Waves is a desert heat haze – heavy, thick and translucent in detail and content (hell, it’s even being released via Mexican Summer). It’s also worth noting that this same factor makes The Waves difficult to asses lyrically – with only the odd word filtering through as comprehensible, there’s much more of an impressionistic suggestion rather than a definitive message.

With everything tying up so nicely into this one overt theme, it’s nice to see on inspection of the track list, that there’s an interesting juxtaposition of song titles that fit with this theme, against those that seem to object to this notion. The title track, for example – though I had originally tied it together with the phrase ‘heat wave’ – seems more to be a cruel temptation to someone suffering in the song’s heat, with Tamaryn snarling “into the waves…” over a menacing bass line.

The Waves does occasionally whisk the listener off to different climates, interspersing a series of seasonal, geographical and periodical studies among those that are unmistakably from its heat-stricken origins. ‘Choirs of Winter’, with it’s quiet sleigh bells ringing perpetually in the background is a faded memory of a snow covered landscape, while ‘Dawning’ feels like an early morning walk under a foliage shade, brimming with hope and confidence. Nearly all however, are characterised by that same sound – a shoegaze guitar blanket, assisted by a lazy, stumbling beat. The other key to this record is its sense of minimalism, repeatedly recycling phrases, letting them evolve slowly over a long period of time.

But despite it’s diversions, The Waves always returns to its starting point. This holds true to the extent that on first listen I actually thought that closing track and past single ‘Mild Confusion’ was a purposely-imposed déjà vu recollection of the opener, stealing ideas and maybe even a bass line. But it’s just another parched and dry song, from the same sun beaten home that we’ve become familiar with.

Being so thick and heavy, the record does at times start to bog the listener down, a problem somewhat alleviated through the album’s brevity – with only nine tracks, the whole thing clocks in at just over 35 minutes. You can’t help but feel, however, that it would benefit from more textural variation, akin to that heard on ‘Haze Interior’, which forgoes the recognisably staggering and hesitant drums, leaving only a lone cymbal to provide a sense of rhythmic drive. It acts as welcome interlude, metallic guitars slicing across your palette in the foreground, whilst in the distance a sleepy, reverb-drenched chord progression wearily reiterates itself.

I’m pretty sure your critical reception of The Waves will be largely down to the way you listen to it: let it sit quietly sit on your shoulder, and it’ll be like treacle slipping through your fingers. Spend too much time concentrating on details amongst the mass of sound, and you run the risk of it becoming a sludgy quicksand. There’s so much to like about The Waves, just be sure not to try too hard in doing so.

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