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While you never want to bestow too much praise on any individual record
label for fear of coming across as partisan, London's Stolen Recordings are
reason enough to urinate into the wind.
This new release by Tap Tap, who featured on the
label's superb twenty-one track compilation LP last year (also check out
Madam and Lishka), comes with immaculate artwork of a giant elephant
presiding over the vast South African plains, and, though I don't know quite what
it has to do with the vintage indie twiddling found inside, the concomitant
effect of art and music is typically brilliant.
Take prime Hefner and skewer it into a different mix and you'll
possibly come up with Tom Sanders, the brains behind this superbly ebbing album
of lunar guitar play and starry-eyed vocals.
Highlights are sprinkled throughout the thirty-minute cut with liberal brilliance, and the sheer fun ranges
from the intricately wrought tempos of opener 100,000 Thoughts to the
languorous pleating of What A Clever Thing To Say.
All is underpinned by Sanders' grounded sensibility, which gives the
songs a poignancy to die for. Sanders exists right on the edge of numbers like I
Am A Kite and Way To Go, Boy, seemingly reluctant to put himself forward too
much as guitars flutter with the shortened wingspan of vampire bats, yet
quietly informs them with a poetry one-tenth bashful and nine-tenths brimming
with life.
The songs of Lanzafame, rolling into each other with a certain
Quo-like ease (oh yes), are epic in its best, most humble sense, the LP
seeming like it's been recorded sideways in an upside-down magic shack.
Pete and the Pirates deserve a mention for the fact
that the track She Doesn't Belong featured on their similar Stop Wait Begin
set last year, and to single out a couple of other off-key nuggets, To Our
Continued Friendship is the sound of dancing with shadows on the happiest night
of your tragicomic life of capsized loves, and Off The Beaten Track is like
Half Man Half Biscuit etching out ebullient wonder with a slightly
heavy heart.
Tap Tap's wonderful musical concoction underpins the profound relation
between label and band, and the magic of art comes from the whole Lanzafame
package like a tricks box from noble times.
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