Are you a fan of downtempo grooves? I’ve released over 4 albums of downbeat and chill out music under the artist name Ganga, while touring, performing internationally and collaborating regularly with other artists in electronic, funk and world music genres. I am blogging regularly on the free chill out music blog, reviewing, recommending and showcasing new chilled beats and tracks from around the world. So make sure you’re signed up to my email list to receive ongoing updates on new chill, world, funk and electronic music as well as free chill out music downloads – including instant access to the track “Light” from my 4th album “Gaia” and another bonus track “Chioolin”.
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Other Lives – Dustbowl III
There’s no point in trying to pinpoint an obvious “single” in Other Lives’ second album, Tamer Animals. Just let every last song wash over you like proper long players once did, from the cool strings and pulsating horns—a technique learned from old minimalist Philip Glass LPs—of “Dark Horse” to the richly orchestrated “Heading East,” a cut that could have been taken from the early instrumental sessions of Other Lives’ old band – Kunek.
“The core of that band (Kunek) is still with me,” says frontman Jesse Tabish, who founded Kunek with cellist Jenny Hsu and the drummer Colby Owens. “In a lot of ways, that is still what I gravitate towards, songwriting wise.”
Unlike their self-titled debut— which was a studio-bound effort that was produced by Beck’s longtime drummer, Joey Waronker—the Tamer Animals album was tracked in the privacy of the band’s own space in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Waronker then mixed the entire affair and sanded down its edges, but it took Other Lives a whole 14 months to get to that point.
But we’re not talking about lazy Sunday sessions here, either. More like 11 songs that were carefully sculpted over time, with certain specific sounds creeping up when the record called for them, and nothing that’s forced or rushed at all.
“Every sound has its own purpose without being too indulgent,” explains Tabish. “There’s nothing like, ‘Hey, let’s rock out on this one!’ It’s all homemade in a way. For better or for worse, it’s all our special sound.”
That sound amounts to one hell of a sweeping listening experience —an atmosphere, a mood, a state of mind. So while you might find yourself going back over and over to the minor-key melodies of “Dust Bowl III” or the Morricone-like arrangements of “Old Statues” more often it’s all part of a greater whole. And since Tabish prefers treating all his vocals like an instrument, the lyrics are left open to interpretation.
To be honest, they don’t even matter. What matters is how Tamer Animals makes you feel and how it aims to hit you in the chest…hard, like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Rós LPs that inspired Tabish want to write this kind of music in the first place. (If you can believe it, he played in punk bands as a little kid and didn’t resume the piano lessons he started in third grade until he was around 18.)
“I’d rather like us to be an ensemble than a genuine rock band,” he says. “That’s my goal—to get away from those traditional ideas about how this thing goes. It’s not a strength in numbers kinda thing, either, where you have12 people are on stage and five of them are playing the same melody. When the music calls for that amount of players, we’ll go there. Then we’ll destroy the band itself.”
“Dustbowl II,” from the new album Tamer Animals, is out May 10 from, is as harsh and barren as its namesake. Droning strings swell around the spare song for its first half until it reaches the central pondering—“Is there any way to get this writing off the wall?”—explodes with a crash of ominous military-march drums, offering what could then only be a bleak, “No.” It is morose and brazen, but never more than it has to be. Its an extravagant song that, like the rest of the album around it, never once borders on pretentious.
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