Tunng - This Is... Tunng: Mother's Daughter and Other Songs (Static Caravan)
Words: Gracelette
There is no right time to play this album of lazy acoustic guitar and folktronic synth, which fizzes with gentle pastoral delight moved on by bitch-slapping leathery beats. It feels wrong in the morning, wrong at night. It’s not that the pace or conceptual integrity is all over the shop (far from it), just that this male-led London duo’s debut album rejects that pesky Protestant work ethic as capitalist propaganda, creating a brave new temporal world where the work/leisure divide has collapsed and both are equally suspect.
So a young girl’s day beside the seaside becomes a witch’s trial by ordeal (‘Mother’s Daughter’). A prostitute rejects her work in favour of bank-robbing anarchy (‘Beautiful And Light’). It’s unsettling, intoxicating, dangerous and chaotic. And, if this is a campfire sing-along under siege, where drifting embers, both sonic and lyrical, flare up into cinematic execution pyres, falling suns, and explosions from the escapist road movie’s inevitable crash, it’s also a heady celebration of women who’re done with their unpaid or underpaid work. The witch sails safely to shore because she’s in league with the Devil. The whore finds that “money comes like rain… this easy feeling” because she robs a bank. And, because growth for growth’s sake is cancer mentality and salvation means letting it go, final track ‘Surprise Me’ is a lover’s beguiling serenade to the outlaw woman, whispering secret plans to “say goodnight to the long day sky” and get away from it all. Just the two of us.
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There is no right time to play this album of lazy acoustic guitar and folktronic synth, which fizzes with gentle pastoral delight moved on by bitch-slapping leathery beats. It feels wrong in the morning, wrong at night. It’s not that the pace or conceptual integrity is all over the shop (far from it), just that this male-led London duo’s debut album rejects that pesky Protestant work ethic as capitalist propaganda, creating a brave new temporal world where the work/leisure divide has collapsed and both are equally suspect. 
