I received this song from the Triple J New Music Podcast a few weeks ago and since then it has been on high rotation on my Ipod.
The song is available as a Download. Or you can get this song from Amazon at – Tunng – Bullets
Review by Anthony Carew in The Age
When they met outside a pub in London in 2003, Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay didn’t seem like a perfect musical match. Genders was a fresh-faced singer-songwriter from Matlock Bath, in Derbyshire. Lindsay was a sound engineer and electronics geek who made incidental audio for advertising and television.
The two began to collaborate on folktronic outfit Tunng. Lindsay had a “dark, dingy little basement studio”, beneath a women’s clothing shop accessible only through a changeroom door.
“We’d get together on Sundays, lock ourselves in there, and just try out ideas. We didn’t have any view to it actually being an album, let alone a band.”
Yet, after a year of Sunday sessions, their music – Genders’ acoustic songs submerged in Lindsay’s gentle electro flickers and buzz – started to pile up. At the behest of London electro record label Static Caravan, they fashioned it into an album.
It wasn’t easy. Halfway through recording, Genders moved back to Derbyshire, making the weekend commute to continue the “basement tapes”. During the week, Genders hardly thought about music, focusing on his day job, working with adults with learning disabilities. And, when the time came to play in public, he wasn’t having it. “I didn’t really want to play live,” he says. “I was interested in pursuing a career and the whole area of working in the helping profession.”
Neither Genders nor Lindsay had “thought of what kind of response (Tunng) would get, if any”. Yet their debut album, Mother’s Daughter and Other Songs, was released in 2005, when the folktronic movement was growing in London, though Tunng were unaware of its existence. “We were very lucky with the timing,” Genders says. “It wasn’t something we were aware of until after the record came out.
“We didn’t know that there was this whole scene of things happening; people to play with, places to play.”
With similar acts such as Adem, Four Tet and the Memory Band working in London, there were plenty of offers for shows.
But Genders never set foot on a stage.
Lindsay, who was much more enthusiastic about live performance, roped in other players and singers to replicate the songs he and Genders had painstakingly built together.
Among them were Becky Jacobs, sister and collaborator of madcap electro weenie Ben “Max Tundra” Jacobs; Ashley Bates, drummer for forgotten shoegazer pin-ups Chapterhouse; and Martin Smith, a clarinet player-cum-adhoc percussionist with a yen for using teeth, seashells, pebbles and rusty chains as instruments.
While the Tunng live band played with Scottish folkies James Yorkston and King Creosote, and toured with popular rock band Doves, Genders stayed home.
So, when the time came to make the second Tunng record, 2006’s Comments of the Inner Chorus, Genders was both on the inside and on the outside, having written the songs but not played with the band.
Then Tunng took their first steps away from claustrophobic studio partnership towards socially functioning ensemble.
Genders packed up and moved back to London, starting his first tour the next day. The travelling that followed brought the members closer together, both musically and personally, and by the time Tunng made their third album, 2007’s Good Arrows, they’d become a band.
And, on the record, they sound it, too. These are no longer the rough sketches and dense mixes of a studio-bound pair but fully formed songs played by many hands.
Genders’ lyrics have grown darker and odder.
“Talking about darker things in a song can highlight the more beautiful, more positive aspects of the music, in a strange way,” he says.
Gender has grown used to life on the road, his former career goals shelved indefinitely.
“I can’t turn around in five years and say: ‘I’d like to go to Australia now,’ ” he laughs.
“The chance is here, now, so I’m doing it while I’ve got the opportunity.”
