Black Tambourine, Black Tambourine
Featured Album
The missing link between psychedelia and shoegaze, still influential years later
Bands starting out are lucky just to get their influences right. All they're likely to be in those early years is some sort of loose cipher for cool sounds that perhaps haven't been combined in exactly the way they've discovered (for examples, see Stereolab, Galaxie 500, Felt and the Clean). Black Tambourine were smart, record-collecting Anglophiles from the Washington, D.C., area with a knack for mixing sharp, strong noise with sweet, sugary pop music. They had great taste in punk and pop, and were born just enough out of time to be destined for obscurity. Fans will rejoice in the addition of six new songs to the group's oeuvre. Where the 1999-released Complete Recordings boasted 10 tracks, this new release swells their output to 16. The new songs — notably "Tears of Joy" and "Lazy Heart" — show more range, too, pushing their sound towards the driving punk energy they undoubtedly displayed live.
They only played a handful of shows, the kids in Black Tambourine — Pam Berry, Archie Moore, Brian Nelson and Mike Schulman — and only released a couple 7-inches. The music was just shambolic enough, the tempo slow enough to belie the influence of both Galaxie 500 and psychedelia, the vocals swathed in enough echo to pleasantly recall '60s girl groups. A few U.K. bands had done something similar a few years earlier — Orange Juice, the Shop Assistants, the Fizzbombs, Flatmates — and acts like My Bloody Valentine would soon bludgeon people's heads with the swirling heaviness of shoegaze. Black Tambourine's music today stands as the missing link between those two movements.
Take "Throw Aggi Off the Bridge," their nerdy, humorous, anthemic love letter to wonderful Scottish shamble-punkers the Pastels. Originally released as a 7-inch on the short-lived Audrey's Diary label (with Louise Brooks on the sleeve), the song's too hard-edged, too indebted to the aggro D.C. scene that birthed them to have been a real C86 track. And the guitars aren't "bendy" enough — the song structure is too straight-ahead and redolent of classic psychedelic pop music to fit in with those shoegazer dudes. Such differences might be minor, but they're also a path toward the sound of a handful of today's best acts. Dum Dum Girls just covered Black Tambourine, and the band is often cited as a primary influence on acts like the Vivian Girls, Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Brilliant Colors. To put it another way: Every one of these songs, recorded 20 years ago, sound like they come from that band you saw in a Brooklyn loft last month.
