Album Review: Tarantella Fall – Abandoned Road
Riddled with stark story-telling imagery and consciously evoking the dark realities of the poorer side of the tracks in the American mid-West, ‘Abandoned Road’ is not exactly your typical Dublin indie band album. Based around the fictional character John W, it’s performed against a backdrop of memorable, wafer-thin chord progressions and moody dispositions, and follows the tale of John’s developing demons, and his many life lows. It’s bordering on a concept album, yet the songs stand alone, dingy and heart-wrenching, and culminating in a mellowed out explosion of dark energy in the ghostly ‘Spanish Point’.
The strength of this album is in the beautifully led vocals: despite the occasional display of purely musical oohs and ahs (few and far between to be fair), they’re at a standard that would almost be readable without their musical accompaniment. Sure, it would make for a pretty depressing story, but put to music, the dark undertones are extremely listenable. ‘Dirt’ is a highlight, a pulsing, throbbing effort that nods to the beat-driven guitars of old-school metal, letting up into a slow, juddering, evocative chorus. Title track ‘Abandoned Road, meanwhile, sees the story reach its crescendo, with the disappearance and discovery of John W’s beloved Jessica, and his subsequent blend of horror and imbalance. It’s a track that succeeds in being so effortlessly atmospheric and memorable it evokes foggy horror films and gets the cogs in the head churning.
The foggy undertones become a theme of ‘Abandoned Road’ in general: this is a stunningly polished effort for a debut album, and while it will be far too dark and manically downbeat for many listeners, its rammed full of drama and musical suspense, doing loud and quiet equally well, and lining up the musical crescendos perfectly with the heights of the storytelling prowess. It even succeeds in ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’ in the lyrics at a few key points, leaving the listener to draw their own conclusions as to just what’s going on in the concept character’s bizarrely morphed mind. How does it all end? You’ll have to go out and buy the album to find that out – in part because it really is a story worth hearing, but also because we don’t want to push our own interpretations on an album that’s done magnificently well at leaving the door of meaning just ajar enough.
We don’t mean to make out that the album is perfect, of course: there are weak spots. The vocals on ‘Last Chance’, for example, demonstrate that singer Chris is better off sticking to the slightly Michael Stipe inspired baritone that seems to be his impressive speciality. To pick holes in such an unheralded, stunningly-written debut is pettiness in the extreme, though.
Tarantella Fall didn’t make their live debut until the start of this year, despite having spent several months before that working on ‘Abandoned Road’. It’ll take a while for word of the song writing prowess the band possess to spread, but a few listens to the album leaves no doubt: they’re capable of making an extremely substantial impact, with their unembellished, low-key vocals standing tall above some beautifully subtle, flowing guitar parts. Let’s just hope they can hold the story together live. If not, they still have an album as good as any released by an Irish act so far this year.