 SR-006 TAP TAP- 'Lanzafame'...
|
| March 16th 2007: David Bowie lists Tap Tap's '100,000 Thoughts' at number 3 in his top ten songs of the moment in The Times... |
|
'....A minute into the opening song '100,000 thoughts', and ive lost my heart
-I can't understand a single word, the singer is so rapturous, the harmonies so
golden, but who cares? Let's sing! Lyrics never translate into print. That's why they're lyrics. Second song 'She Does'nt Belong' tumbles and soars for the stars like a cross between th aformentioned Chills and my Nineties Irish crush The Frank and Walters, and yes...I'm sold.The way the vocals vibrate, mic overloaded. The way the drums come pounding through solid and friendly. The guitars that nestle snugly up to the other guitars. And of course, its all about the sound, not just the song - Phil Spector, Sonic Youth and The Ramones understood that, as did flying Nun, why don't more artists?....'
Everett True- PLAN B MAGAZINE
|
SUNDAY TIMES: culture section (14/1/07)
“These songs seem forced into the world by a buckling, overcrowded brain. The popcraft exhibited is light enough and "now" enough to reduce the listener to booster-mush on a first listen. "Here Cometh" is an arch offering of Kinks blues, while "Off the Beaten Track" imagines a bizarro Belle & Sebastian preoccupied with Kinks rock. Taming psychedelia and punk into sloppy/pristine DIY pop. I could listen to ‘desperately talented frontman’ Thomas Sanders sing "can't" like "Kant" all day, and all of the night “ |
|
Tap Tap is the wonderous new creation from Pete And The Pirates' Thomas Sanders. 11 tracks of gloriously wayward lo-fi indie that touches on Arcade Fire, Belle And Sebastian, Pavement and even the Kinks. Effortlessly immaculate songs that soar to the sky and float on fluffy melodic clouds but with the constant danger of DIY indie storms. Highly recommended!! |
Is this the last great record of 2006 or the first great record of 2007? Either way, it’s an essential album that’s currently a limited edition cutely parcelled CD but could easily be another massive leftfield hit like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Arcade Fire. Those two bands are touchstones for the joyous, shiny pop of Lanzafame; Tommy Sanders might have a melancholy voice but his songs are fizzy like sherbet with huge, thumping percussion that stomps around your skull like happy ballet dancers in size 12 Doctor Martens. ‘100,000 Thoughts’ is a mighty rising-and-falling rhythm propelled by bass drum and handclaps while ‘I Am a Kite’ has a hypnotic, driving tone that bores fresh holes in your cerebellum and pours in the sweetness. ‘On My Way’ is simply a fantastic chiming pop song that bursts with melodic goodness, a little like Clap Your Hands and a lot like a crossover hit if there ever was one (or any justice in the world). There’s also a version (better, maybe) of ‘She Doesn’t Belong’ from the ‘Wait Stop Begin EP’ by Pete and the Pirates, for whom Tommy Sanders is also lead singer (and on this record is abetted by various Pirates). Don’t look to Brooklyn or Montreal for the next great thing when it’s already down the M4: this is the glorious indie payoff we’re all constantly looking for: this is the Next Big Thing! |
Solo project from Pete & The Pirates man er... Thomas, this is brewing to become one of 2007's sleepers. Already a hit in the States thanks to massive blog play, this Arcade Fire-esque delight is another incredible LP on the wonderful Stolen Recordings. |
No.5. Tap Tap, lanzafame (stolen) Thomas Sanders' magical mystery puts Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to shame. |
Nothing is off limits for England's Tap Tap. It's been said that variety is the spice of life, well then Tap Tap is salt, pepper, peprika and the whole spice rack."To Our Continuing Friendship"- which Brian Wilson himself might even be a little jealous of.Tap Tap's Lanzafame is a damn fine record, it surely will live on in your head long after the album ends. |
First up and I'm loving the music today.. the crazy English winds have blown my ears, hair and cheeks into one lump ontop of my neck and the whole thing is vibrating to the new sounds from Stolen records' TAP TAP. What a wonderful energy packed debut from the Reading outfit. This is brimming with enough joy and inventiveness to lift you from the pit of your bed in these cold mornings. It sounds like a less orchestrated Arcade Fire, a more energetic Syd Barrett, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and it totally has got me dancing. It's raw,fresh music with hand claps and reverby drums underpinning the extensive use of various instruments with driven vocals. At times it's intense with fast jangly guitars and haunting melodies that crash away creating a masterclass in energy driven melody led tunesmith. Its not without its delicate moments either with the final song pulling you like a sad Gary Numan. Can I be anymore persuasive? erm... but if you like any of the aforementioned artists or if you want to hear a debut album that's going to grow and grow throughout the year.... you got the Maggie guarantee!!! |
While you never want to bestow too much praise on any individual record label for fear of coming across as partisan, London's Stolen Recordings are reason enough to urinate into the wind. This new release by Tap Tap, who featured on the label's superb twenty-one track compilation LP last year (also check out Madam and Lishka), comes with immaculate artwork of a giant elephant presiding over the vast South African plains, and, though I don't know quite what it has to do with the vintage indie twiddling found inside, the concomitant effect of art and music is typically brilliant. Take prime Hefner and skewer it into a different mix and you'll possibly come up with Tom Sanders, the brains behind this superbly ebbing album of lunar guitar play and starry-eyed vocals. Highlights are sprinkled throughout the thirty-minute cut with liberal brilliance, and the sheer fun ranges from the intricately wrought tempos of opener 100,000 Thoughts to the languorous pleating of What A Clever Thing To Say. All is underpinned by Sanders' grounded sensibility, which gives the songs a poignancy to die for. Sanders exists right on the edge of numbers like I Am A Kite and Way To Go, Boy, seemingly reluctant to put himself forward too much as guitars flutter with the shortened wingspan of vampire bats, yet quietly informs them with a poetry one-tenth bashful and nine-tenths brimming with life. The songs of Lanzafame, rolling into each other with a certain Quo-like ease (oh yes), are epic in its best, most humble sense, the LP seeming like it's been recorded sideways in an upside-down magic shack. Pete and the Pirates deserve a mention for the fact that the track She Doesn't Belong featured on their similar Stop Wait Begin set last year, and to single out a couple of other off-key nuggets, To Our Continued Friendship is the sound of dancing with shadows on the happiest night of your tragicomic life of capsized loves, and Off The Beaten Track is like Half Man Half Biscuit etching out ebullient wonder with a slightly heavy heart. Tap Tap's wonderful musical concoction underpins the profound relation between label and band, and the magic of art comes from the whole Lanzafame package like a tricks box from noble times. |
The name Tap Tap may conjure up images of either a group of twee Swedish indiepop minstrels to some, or - judging by the meticulously-illustrated elephant on the album's front sleeve - perhaps a world music or folk collective. The musical comparisons aren't a million miles off, perhaps; but there's no Polyphonic Spree-style platoon behind this moniker. What's more, Tap Tap is a side project, its sole protagonist Tom Sanders spending most of his days as lead singer of little-known UK indie outfit Pete and the Pirates. The result of his mutinous indiscretion is Lanzafame, an album that's already been hailed by some as the sleeper hit of 2007, and one which will surely see the independently-signed Sanders gain the same sort of popular indie success as the likes of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Wolf Parade. Though none of the arrangements on Lanzafame are as ornate or as lavish as either of those bands, the Reading native's tenuous vocals stretch the same boundaries as Alec Ounsworth's, and his wry lyrical prowess ('You smile like a lady / You drink like a boy') induce similar smirks to those of Spencer Krug. Refusal to submit to Tap Tap's charm is futile from the off; 100,000 Thoughts reels the listener in with its sweet little acoustic intro, simplistic charm and evocations-of-sunny-summer-holidays riff; She Doesn't Belong, a lo-fi cover of a Pete and the Pirates track, is a bittersweet, jangly little ditty, and To Our Continuing Friendship bubbles under with glorious harmonies that shyly swagger forth. It's not only current bands that Sanders' sound coincides with, though: there's a definite Kinks beat to the gravelly rattle of Here Cometh, and Off the Beaten Track's mod-like stomp could be an early Who outtake. The general ethos on Lanzafame seems to be one of minimum instrumentation, maximum experimentation - and it's an ethos that's executed in a thoroughly irresistible fashion. Watch this one grow. |
Opening song "100,000 Thoughts" is a fantastic pop song, full of a simple sort of drumbeat and lots of crazy guitaring, along with the distinctive vocal style of the singer. It sort of made me think of a British sounding Arcade Fire. On "To Our Continuing Friendship", again its damn catchy, and is the sort of song I imagined punters in theatres on the end of piers by the seaside way back in yesteryear would be singing along to. On "Here Cometh", I couldn't help thinking it was a sort of indie-pop-jazz fusion thing going on. Sounds crazy I know, its just theres instuments coming in all over the place, when you don't expect, or even think they should. But, its sounds fantastic! At times I am sure I even heard influences as varied as The Cure and Johny Cash as well, just to throw into the mix of things. The album carries on in this bizarre way, with its beautifully ramshackle sound. At times it sounds like the only thing holding the songs together is a bit of blutac. You think it could fall apart at any moment. Obdviously, it doesn't, it just adds to the charm of the record. I absolutely love this album, and am having a job to prise it out of the cd player at the moment. Do yourselves a favour, and check it out. |
It sounds a little like a lingere store but Tap Tap's debut album isn't liable to crop on many Valentine's Day compilations in the near future we expect. Well, unless some small label somewhere is planning a series of songs that sound like they've been left on your answering machine by a confused friend late at night. Even then, the rambling discursive of the songs don't exactly lend themselves to a clear romantic message.
Not that I could swear to exactly what a lot of these songs are about. The music seems to comes from a sort of wilderness, like a small band practicing and playing with a whole bunch of instruments in a desert miles
from their recording studio and allowing the sound to waft down to the microphone, picking up that isolation acoustic on the way. As such, it feels like there's a lack of cohesion to things, like bits of the songs are drifting out in different directions, the Americana (or, perhaps that should be Canadiana) alt.folk tint to the troubadoring songs making it feel a little incoherent at times. Which in a way is impressive since, Tap Tap is actually a solo act, the side project of a member of wonderful indie band Pete And The Pirates. It still manages to sound similar to the work of the group just, more frayed at the seams, somehow like there are more people in the band and they're not quite reading from exactly the same draft of the songs.
The songs themselves, ignoring momentarily this perhipheral instrumental static, are reasonably straight forward. They aren't exactly verse chorus verse affairs but the structure is easy enough to follow and there aren't really any sharp edges in danger of taking out anyone's eye. Much like Pete And The Pirates, they're well constructed songs that feel solid but belie a complexity and restless composition. Drums pound and guitars are strummed flitteringly, vocal harmonies roll along with the music and nothing really jars, it's just very subtly maintained. That's how they would sound, in different hands, at least.
In the hands of Tap Tap this casually intelligent indie songsmanship is buried under a much more gritty combination of rustic sounding production and crudely overlayed instruments. The vocals are deep within the song somewhere while the guitars feel not so much detunes but as though they're being played back from a slightly worn tape. It's all very analogue and anachronistic. Which works to put you off to begin with but, once you've got to grips with the sound the album is going for, begins to add fauna to the room, plant roots in your carpet and spring crumbling bark from your walls.
Before you know it, then, you're in a house in a middle of nowhere not sure if you're warm or cold, in a giant seat that feels awkward but not uncomfortable, listening to a full band get to grips with their recent desire to play together, despite being a little bit the worse for gin and late nights. It's charming but you get the impression it's not not nearly as knocked-out as it sometimes sounds.
MAPS-Aidienn Ellison
copyright stolenrecordings Ltd. 2005 | email | site design: hollybliss