Dreams Of Desert And Water : The Magical Music of Tan Cologne
Cave Vaults Of The Moon (2020, Labrador Records) Earth Visions Of Water Spaces (2022, Labrador Records)
New Mexico is a weird place. On the few occassions I’ve been in Alburquerque it’s like being on another planet - the sky and earth deep red, the horizon an endless arc, the only break in the vista the sporadic flashes of military hardware in the sky, the trails of white plume. It feels mysterious, secretive, timeless, barely inhabited by humans, mainly inhabited by a silence and space occassionally ruptured by tiny suggestions of human presence. The two stunning records from New Mexico duo Tan Cologne thus far - 2020’s ‘Cave Vaults On The Moon’ and the soon-dropping ‘Earth Visions Of Water Spaces’ could not have come from anywhere else. Theirs is music constructed out of small details that coalesce into a gorgeous whole but behind the music, behind Lauren Green & Marissa Macias’ sublime songs and playing, you can hear the desert. These are records suffused with VIBE. And the vibe is uniquely New Mexico.
You may have heard music like Tan Cologne before. By turns they suggest the strung-out lambent wonder of Mazzy Star, the more Nordic classically reverbed Velvets-hum of Cats Of Transnistria, the vintage deliciousness of Besnard Lakes. Crucially though Tan Cologne impart similar sources with their own unique imprint. Drums here are delicate, spacey, heavy-lidded with stoned dissipation, guitars a mix of dreamy acoustic and just the right heavily-reverbed touches and traces. In this kind of music - the tiny details are everything and the details here are sublime. The opening title track of ‘Cave Vaults On The Moon’ welcomes you into Tan Cologne's world - it's like stepping through an aperture into another, older world. The 60s effect the sound here but there's also suggestions of krautrock (particularly the bucolic end of kraut) and the more strung-out odd moments in 80s US music where a new kind of non-urban reality was conjured (Meat Puppets, even Shiva Burlesque). So far, so dated BUT it's doesn't come across as remotely dated in the slightest - this is Lauren & Marissa's response to now, and the care and craft behind each song is what immediately makes it more than mere assemblage. This is not 'loose' but it's not dogmatic, it's not careful but it's not careless either, this music walks that delicious tightrope between feeling painstaking and effortless. And what it offers - escape, teleportation, the diffusion of ego in the uncaring spectacular curve of the earth - man we need that right now. #
Both albums are essential. Cave Vaults On The Moon came first. 'Strange Gods' hums with an inner radiance, gently shuffles on beautifully measured drums and percussion, turns itself into a hypnotic secular gospel every time the chorus hits. 'Empty Vessels' starts like a tremulous Windy & Carl track and then does something TC do often - picks out the melody, sinks it into your head, then keeps adding in shades and shadows and shimmers around that central melodic pulse until you're somewhere in space, certainly a worrying high distance from the ground. I love the only words I can make out ('hands on treasure') because they're suggestive and indistinct, as are most of the words here, which really allows you to just bathe in the dusty dreaminess of Lauren & Marissa's voices. Many of the songs here, like the stunning 'Alien' and the fantastic post-punk psyche of 'Cerro' are like My Bloody Valentine but with all the noise removed in favour of a careful CHOICE of distinct elements to populate these queer structures and shapes. And so Tan Cologne map an entirely unique place and space that feels littered with forgotten antecedents - you feel on the utterly divine 'New Dune' ('arms encircling you, oh and it trips me out') that you're exploring this music and this desert with them. 'Quartz Of Rose' is a hazy, phasey heat-shimmered trip out beyond the horizon, before 'Monsoon' brings you back home, to the shack you've felt you've been travelling from for the whole record, watching the sunset, feeling the infinite darkness press down like velvet, eyes widening at the galaxies above.
The new album Earth Visions Of Water Space gratifyingly stays in the same souindworld where the debut was, albeit charged with a new kineticism and stealth, and seemingly even more committed to the liquid sense in Tan Cologne’s music. Where Cave Vaults was dry, hot, heat-hazed, here we’re somewhere far more amniotic, where light bends and refracts and where movement is altogether new and unresistant. It’s like diving down from the cobalt sky into the valley, seeing water at work shaping the earth, diving deep into the ancient life it uncovers. When it’s quiet it’s quieter than they’ve ever been, when it paints its canvasses it’s in deep blue depths and shimmering surface light. There’s no macho surge in this music, just the fluid keeping of a spell intact. Opener ‘Topaz Wave’ almost threatens to build into something noisier - everytime that darkness threatens to break through though, TC plunge us into something liquid and blue and green and akin to the floatiest moments of Hugo Largo’s ‘Mettle’. Looked at in a 2D way it’s precisely the lack of OOMPH in Tan Cologne’s music that makes it so compelling - the way ‘Floating Gardens’ seems to invert pop’s traditionally stable bottom-end and hang a whole song from the precipice of a waterfall - but in their resistance to traditional structural pop/rock egoism and pushiness it’s precisely that disappearance into evanescent sound that gives Tan Cologne music its emotional heft, even if you can’t hear the words, or have to imagine the longing they irresistibly contain. The voices are always a million miles from stridency but crucially don’t fall into that trap of faux fragility - they remain clear, translucent but confidently themselves on the bewitching likes of ‘Orbs’ and ‘Space In The Palms’ (on the latter, I particularly love how it reveals a key thing with Tan Colognes music - it can be angry, agit, wound up, tense but never ‘challenging’ thank fuck). ‘Pastels’, an instrumental, is for me the highlight of this new set - a totally UNrock sound more akin to the chamber-pop of a Nico or ARKane, tiny twists of guitar ebbing and sighing on the two-chord spiral before ‘Blue Swim’ recalls Spain and Acetone with skin-puckering delight. ‘Winds Below Water’ is the point where you genuinely start feeling destabilised, like TC are transmogrifying you into a life aquatic, sea-legs unable to walk steady land, a new kind of respiration setting in. I swear I’m not tripping. Truly Tan Cologne are a spellbinding, magical duo. Let them walk you under their skies and pull you under.
They sound really interesting, but I couldn't find a release date for their 2nd album on Bandcamp. When does it come out?