Tunng albums transcend time. They don’t fit in a pattern of what’s popular at any particular moment. They use elements that seem to be ridiculously out of place, forming an off kilter whole residing in a world of its own. While Love You All Over Again is five years on from Dead Club, it tracks their progression moving forward by returning to their roots from Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs some twenty years ago.
To say the surreal is new again wouldn’t be accurate, it never went out of fashion. Led by Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay, they don’t fly in the face of fashion, they just tend to ignore it as they merrily play with the fabric of time and space, altering it to their purposes. For a largely acoustic folktronic band, the African funk of ‘Yeekeys’ doesn’t seem the least bit out of place, merging lyrics that reveal Genders’ love of wordplay even as it lays waste of common sense, “Camp in a cave made of gravy and bedrock/ Dream of the beast underneath every odd sock.” Proving the logic may not always be what matters. Besides, at the end of the day logic is often overrated.
Amidst the jumble of acoustic guitars, Genders often reflects on how the pain and darkness of life is altered by the magic and wonder that appears out of nowhere. From the opening prelude of ‘Everything Else’ where a scratchy voice lays out the premise, “They speak in a tongue they don’t understand,” the song lays out a dialectic between what is and what makes no sense, “Why do we play this/ Infernal game of joy and fear?/ We’re all still here.”
The twisted rhythms and bass struggle with soft acoustic guitars as ‘Didn’t Know Why’ and its protagonist, Jenny, deals with a world which makes no sense. “Looked for the cat that swallowed a fly/ Swallowed that too and didn’t know why/ Didn’t know why everybody must die/ Didn’t know why every lover must sigh.” Confronted with the unexplainable, the solutions we find often don’t appear to make much sense.
In a world that demands reality, the ephemeral often goes missing. These are the sorts of moments that Tunng revel in revealing, moments that make sense in their immediacy and then are lost forever. ‘Levitate A Little’ casts an eye toward some of these. “From the bus stop to the chip shop/ From the tower block to the sea/ Twenty trees in every raven/ Twenty ravens in each tree.”
As Tunng, Mike Lindsay, Sam Genders, Becky Jacobs, Ashley Bates, Martin Smith and Phil Winter have created a canon of music that goes round bends and follows trails others often miss. Love You All Over Again does just that. More than simply an addition to their catalog, or even a new beginning, is another journey down pathways less traveled and we are much better for it.
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