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How do you sum up a sound as unique and mellifluous, exploratory and brilliantly strange as this? With difficulty, but as that is my job here, I had better give it a go. Writing about music in the post-genre world we find ourselves in is an interesting place. With the tribalism and generic demarcations of the past to a large degree erased from the creative landscape, there are fewer solid handholds for the jobbing scribbler to hold on to. This means that the writing, like the music it is trying to describe, heads into some interesting new places. But it is when you put pen to paper on behalf of bands such as Tarantula Bill that you find yourself on a really strange trip.
“Supertramp,” their new single, is a mercurial blend of backwards-glancing and forward-thinking music. There is something slightly pastoral and nostalgic about its sound, the feeling that it might have been created at the point when the Summer of Love psychedelic pop vibe drifted off into more seventies prog rock realms.
I say it is forward-thinking because although many of the sonic threads it weaves together resonate with a hippie-rock vibe, its cinematic tones and gentle rock grooves come together in altogether new ways. It might feel like a product of the ’60s, but it is a ’60s that perhaps never truly existed…until now!
Music is cyclical; do you need any more proof than this?
