A review of Team Tomb's Team Tomb by me's me

Welcome back to Kittens in Ties, loyal reader. For this brief instant, we (meaning I) have slipped into the guise of music reviewer. If you like Pitchfork reviews, pretend I gave the album a 8.125 and a BNM tag or whatever it is they are doing over there nowadays. And listen to it here, and make up your own mind, knowing, however, that if your opinion isn't mine it is wrong.

In a review of the new Foals record, David Goldstein wrote, “What’s a telltale sign that a young British band thinks they’re hot shit? When they open their album with an instrumental,” and while I don’t know if Team Tomb thinks they are “hot shit,” I can say they sound pretty damn sure of themselves. After about thirty seconds of rhythm-less guitar noodling, the hi-hat comes in and clicks the intro track into a somber groove, the kind of groove the comprises the majority of the album. It’s something of a statement, though not made with any words. By the time the falsetto vocals slip into the mix you are already well aware of what kind of band you’re listening to.

For the most part, Team Tomb rides a mellow intensity throughout the album. The guitar licks, performed by Caleb Ian Campbell (formerly of the Polycorns), are graceful, sometimes biting, but never reaching beyond the slinky pop rhythms the band has carved out for itself. In that same vein, the drums drive and propel the tunes with a sort of rhythmic certainty but never really crescendo. Behind it all, simple keyboard lines complete the aesthetic.

A Doodle of the Devil Blowing Bubbles

Every picture needed horns, and he wanted to be the hand that distributed them. He realized his realm of influence in that regard had its limitations, but his elementary school made a habit of telling children that they can accomplish anything they put their minds to--no matter how improbable. As a result, he earnestly believed he could sketch horns onto every political figure in every textbook, onto every portrait of every composer reprinted in every program for every concert band performance, onto every smiling child on every box of girl scouts cookies, onto every author's photograph on every book jacket wrapped around every book in every library or bookstore, onto every poorly sketched stick figure in every bathroom stall in every truck stop across the country. For now, he would have to settle with this particular program, content with defacing this idle giant as that gentle beast gazed over a landscape somehow meant to signify the accompanying piece, but eventually he would need to expand, would need not to regulate his art as a means of contending with boredom but as a militant expression of disdain for a horn-less society.