Tuesday 6 July 2010

Camera & Tremor - The Tamborines (Beat-Mo Records)

It’s very late. Or maybe really early. You find yourself on a narrow sidestreet you’ve never really paid much attention to before. Sound throbs from an open doorway and you step closer to investigate. There’s a shabby corridor painted deep red, steep steps that lead you into a dimly lit basement room. It’s loud in here. Very loud. The noise is disorientating and you put out a hand to balance yourself. Turns out you’re clutching the edge of the bar, so you order yourself a drink. It’s vodka or nothing here. A pure, clean rush. It burns satisfyingly on your lips as you flick your eyes across the crowd. Everyone’s dressed entirely in black. Some of them wear sunglasses and move languidly through the noise as if it’s physically restraining them. Some shake their heavy fringes in time to the ricochet drumbeats.

A man’s voice singing, “I trip inside your wired mind”. There’s a band onstage. Shaky Super 8 film flickers across the back wall and camouflages the players. You see an eye here, a hand there, a pointy boot, a perfect bowlcut. Three people are making that colossal sound. Guitar and keyboard growl and throb, whine and shimmer whilst the drummer hammers it all home. It’s heavy and it makes you want to move. To nod your head and stamp your feet. You move closer to the stage and let the music judder through you, sound-waves pulsing the air around your face.

Then you’re taken by surprise. A tambourine shaken HARD splits the dissonance. There’s sweetness amongst the snarl. The fuzz ‘n’ distortion crowd are here because they like a hit of POP with their raw power. A taste of honey with their bouquet of barbed wire kisses. Here are tunes that dip and glide and make you feel secretly serene. You realise that these songs are going to be indelibly inked into your mind from now on. There’ll always be a swooping melody or a keyboard line tumbling over and over to rush you along through the tumult. The noise is building again, pedals are stomped, strings are scratched, four notes on the keyboard that won’t take no for an answer. Ultra-white strobe lights shiver on and off, on and off, on and off, slicing up the room into disconnected slivers off space and time…

You wake on Sunday Morning. In your head there’s a honey bee buzz. Unfurling your clenched fingers you find you’re clutching a scrap of paper. Written in tiny letters, all lower-case, it says, ‘camera & tremor’.

www.thetamborines.com

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