Tamra are in over their heads in their new single and video Flood — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The second single from the L.A. / Boise rockers’ upcoming EP Light Reading, Flood is a song that watches the tenuous barriers between self-healing and self-destruction wash away — thrashing in a sort of up-tempo tranquility during the last seconds of consciousness before drowning:
“Medicine in the waterway
Infection in that same vein
Drainage out in the halls
Fades in to clouds and aerosols.”
Like the rest of Light Reading, it’s a track driven by distorted guitars that barely dodge familiarity, just exceeding recommended dosages for inversion, repetition, and strange major-key saturation. Cut with synths that oscillate between peripheral and present, they blend with a rhythm section not immune to its own idiosyncrasies. When the vocals come in, the entire compound is personified. It’s young Van Morrison against young Modest Mouse. It’s the melodic, melancholic reverence of Astral Weeks — iridescent and almost out of place in the electric, erratic landscape of The Lonesome Crowded West.
Light Reading is the first EP from Tamra: A band because of a loitering habit. Eloquent in the way that a Big Lots! parking lot is eloquent, the record is the end result of a certain kind of mutual incoherence. The kind shared by not-totally-lifeless individuals parked not-totally-legally after sunset. The kind informed by cold fluorescence and cold weather; refracted through vacuous signage and bad traffic; relegated to day jobs and suburban sprawl and sugar and garbage; animated by the idea that, though there’s nothing to do, there’s still something to say.
It’s accessible. And then it’s illegible. The formula suggests structural soundness: A path as paved as the interstate. But the suggestion is just scaffolding: a mirage hanging right above the highway. Somewhere in the sum of the parts, the whole thing feels off-kilter. It’s indie rock dissolved in heat waves of emo. It’s post-punk, punctured by pop. It’s something you’ve heard before, until it isn’t.
Tamra are four middle-class white men approaching 30: The exact band no one wants to hear from. The collective output of Kenton Freemuth (vocals, guitar), Andrew Freemuth (guitar), Ethan Bjornsen (bass) and Chris Clayton (drums) is a byproduct of that unavoidable byline. It’s a byproduct of first-world waste, the American West, the feedback loop that is loneliness, and the slipstream that runs through the basement when the boys play their bad music. It’s the chemical spill from the head-on collision between identity and environment. Each is contaminated, each is the contaminant. The scene is sometimes unintelligible — sometimes universal.
That’s what Light Reading is. The phrase works for the songs, or spaces, the same way it works for writing. There’s superficiality, convention, ugliness—none of which necessarily read as profound, or even relevant. There’s a vagueness, a void of clear meaning, like there is in physical space. At the same time, there’s energy. There’s more to the phrase. Next to the deprecation, there’s a suggestion to read the light.
Watch the video for Flood above, listen to the track below, and find Tamra on their website and Instagram.
