A taster for a long-overdue full album, Tender Prey’s welcome recorded debut is a three-track, ten-minute EP which teases with its brevity and stripped-back sound but quickly establishes its mood. It’s the smell of the air on a fourth consecutive hot day, half an hour before the storm comes; intoxicating and disorientating, a harbinger of elemental changes on the horizon.
The title track opens on bluesy chords and a languorous Shangri-Las vocal, a conspiratorial coo familiar to anyone who’s seen Bryon silence a chattering room with an opening line. Stirring up a dust-dry and hazy atmosphere, it’s little surprise that thoughts turn to the bottle. Amid the raised volume and wordless squalls and shrieks, the chorus laments (or salutes) an eternal cycle: “We drink to forget / we drink to dance / we drink to forget again”. Other than a few shakes of percussion it’s a spare, grubby Rid Of Me style blues, captivating and visceral.
It reflects her more recent solo shows, where a renewed confidence in performing means she demands your attention. Even at her least structured, most musically fragile she’s an elemental, intimately powerful performer; the guitars have a loose, languid three-beer quality, ringing and crackling in the choruses.
‘Strong Feelings’’ elliptical, double tracked vocals have a slightly disorientating imperfection, not quite tracking each other directly (or maybe it’s these cheap headphones). A confident swagger and playfulness here that recalls Kim Deal, with a grinding garage riff that’s loose and spacious and a brilliantly cheeky payoff on the chorus hook. Like Deal’s most intimate moments, it’s also fun, a devilish grin almost audible as the open chords clang and the needle clatters into the red.
The fragile, bluesy balladry of ‘Hold Me Down’ is the most reminiscent of Good Fortune Sounds, the 7” released as Le B in 2009. It’s a fragmented, gently winding thing that flares briefly and brightly with a slender, deliberate solo riff backed by an otherworldly choir of Lauras. Here she’s cautious, edgy, the closest she comes to displaying any vulnerability on the EP.
It’s a logical bridge between the relaxed yet perfectly poised one-take sketches of Good Fortune Sounds and the stormy, bluesy full-band stuff we can expect from the album proper. That album arrives on Finders Keepers offshoot Bird Records later this year, and ‘Good Wife’ appears on the beautifully packaged label sampler cassette Crystal Plumage. Both that, and this fine EP, are recommended purchases while you sharpen your talons in readiness for the main event.
Buy: http://tenderprey.bandcamp.com/
Tender Prey photo by Kirsten McTernan
