Tunng - Mother'sDaughters and Other Songs

Fri 17th Mar, 2006 in Music Reviews

Tunng’s debut album, the pragmatically titled Mother’s Daughters and Other Songs, is richly atmospheric, densely layered, and unconfined by any notions of traditional genre.

Tunng’s nearest musical counterpart would be Iceland’s Sigur Ros. Like the Scandinavians, Tunng (pronounced ‘tongue’) have an uncanny knack for blending music and noises that are seemingly incompatible into wondrous and beautiful soundtracks to modern life. Where the music of Sigur Ros is often described as the ‘language of the icebergs’, Tunng might have found the lost tongue of the Earth.

Through their alchemic combinations of traditional acoustic instrumentation and digital beats and sounds, Tunng have carved their own distinct genre, known as ‘folktronica’. Arguably the greatest exponents of this burgeoning genre, their unique musical styling has garnered a great deal of international attention. Tunng’s music is a wonderful collision of natural, earthy tones with harsh, industrial sounds.

Overlaying sampled acoustic guitars and banjo licks with deep, mechanical beats and digital whirring sounds like a recipe for confusion, but with the deft touch of Mike Lindsay and Sam Genders (the musicians behind Tunng), this normally irreconcilable collection of sounds takes on an indescribable quality. By blending such familiar elements into the expansive and original melodies, Tunng manage to make their music both innovative and immediately accessible. Though it defies understanding, the mixture of these two distinct aesthetics produces an inescapable resonance that seems to speak in an earthy tongue, like the sounds of a lush rainforest.

The vocals intertwine perfectly with the lazy resonance of the music, sung in deep, ponderous tones that seem to have been sampled themselves. This adds even greater texture to the songs, as the vocals can be enjoyed on a purely aesthetic level, while still maintaining lyrical integrity and interest. The tonal range in each song combines with deliberately blurred song boundaries to create an expansive and cohesive album. In fact, the entire album ebbs and flows in such a way that each track seems more like chapters of a larger song, with each chapter a distinct part of a greater whole. The effect is immersive, drawing the listener into an entire, self-contained world for 45 minutes.

The rise of new musical genres can often reflect the society that shaped them, and rarely has this been more accurate than in the case of Tunng’s boundary-defying effort. In an era of rampant globalisation, the industrial world is rapidly expanding, provoking many to reflect on the natural world. Never has the dichotomy between these two worlds been clearer. It is this duality that makes Mother’s Daughters… such an enthralling album, so perfectly reflecting the internal tensions of humanity, as we struggle to reconcile our desire for progress with our connection to this world.