Other Lives - Tamer Animals

If music was a purely visual and not aural art-form, ‘Tamer Animals’ by Other Lives would be a windswept, panoramic epic, filmed in dusty sepia, short on words, long on moody looks, plot twists and turns, scooping best Director and Cinematographer Oscars, resulting in subsequent riches, talk shows, and numerous models for wives.

Relative anonymity following a polished-studio-sounding, but undistinguished debut album, inspired the band to return to their home town of Oklahoma, and explore a more copious, yet production-restrained, approach to song writing over an arduous fourteen-month period.

The result is a more requisite and lovingly crafted sound, a captivating combination of bounding rhythms, and pulsing, intricate, arrangements of guitars, pianos, and assorted strings and wind instruments, spaciously positioned to allow sprightly, beautifully harmonised interplay.

There’s more than a nod, and a wink, to the celestial richness of Fleet Foxes and Midlake. The wistful vocals, at times almost shy, wander between breathy sighs and falsetto musings, in contrast to the grandeur of the music. On ‘Dark Horse’, vocals soar above the slow Bossa Nova trumpet beat and towering string arrangements, and similarly over rhythmic tambourine on ‘As I Lay My Head Down’.

On the eponymous, ‘Tamer Animals’, the flat, haunting vocals, perfectly accompany the lamenting piano, evoking the dreamy majesty of Radiohead, reminiscent also in the ebbing song structures and relentless driven nature of ‘Weather’, and on the standout ‘Dust Bowl III’, a slow acoustic lament, that builds to a shimmering electric guitar epic.

A must listen if you like musical journeys, and possibly the best thing to come out of this mid-west state since Rodgers and Hammerstein, or the Flaming Lips, or Woody Guthrie…