Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Song(s) of the Day # 856 Black Tambourine


One interesting trail for me about writing on here and subsequently looking around more actively for music has been the growing realisation about just how influential trends and bands that I grew up with in the eighties have proved to be over the course of time.


Such is the case with all that independent jangling I heard on UK night-time radio in the eighties. It was impossible to imagine at the time that it was built to last. But all those bands like The Shop Assistants, Talulah Gosh and The Flatmates have a definite, enduring legacy, one you could never foresee them building.



The baton from these bands was first picked up by Black Tambourine, a quartet from Washington D.C. though you would never know from listening to them, so absolutely grounded is every note and vocal inflection from that frantic English strumming and dreaming of  the C-86 bands.



It had to be said that Black Tambourine did this all very well and there's a little more bass muscle in the undertow here than many of those bands could customarily manage. They in their turn are now considered 'seminal', having passed the baton on themselves to a series of bands keen to preserve and replicate their own slight variations on the sound of eternal teenage wistfulness and faint longing.



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