Tunng ‘Turbines’ – Album Review

 

Concept albums are dangerous things. They smack of musicians who, tired of the world around them, disappear up their own orifices to invent somewhere they can indulge their every overblown whim and spout nonsense about the fantastical. They are albums with an agenda, woven together to produce everything from the ins and outs of intergalactic love stories to down-with-the-proles politicisms from minds long since departed from the everyday.

Safe to say, the good ones are few and far between – and the first signs around Tunng’s meander into the concept battlefield, the nine-song-strong Turbines, bring forth worries that it will fall amongst the dead and forgotten or, worse still, the unforgettably misguided. After all, it is not only set in that most anachronistic of venues, the middle English village, but it is named after the Nimbys’ favourite icon of their self-righteous fight to save the countryside, the much-hated wind turbine.

Barely halfway into opener Once though, such fears evaporate as the familiar layered vocals, gentle mish-mash of folk and electronica and the truly catchy rhythms that have long since found Tunng a warm place in the hearts of music lovers kick in. Turbines is, thankfully, one of those concept albums which survives outside of its own world and draws you into a vision with a friendly arm and a hearty welcome. But then it should be, as this is ground which Tunng have trodden before, as part of the 2007 folk musical project The Imagined Village, where their retelling of the medieval myth of Death and the Maiden was one of the stand-out moments.

 

 

However, for all its welcome, Turbines is not the excessively friendly album that might be expected. In Tunng terms, this is a dark departure, with a hint of claustrophobia here and a foreboding melody there to paint a picture of a fractured community, rather than one bound up with each other and against the world. Trip Trap, for example, tells of a woman who is capricious and uncaring – ‘she’s sweet, she’s sour/a poisonous flower’ – and comes wrapped in with a suitably menacing backdrop, while So Far From Here’s disjointed rhythms and melodies create an air of gentle panic, before a triumphant bridging chorus of ‘never feel like liars/never feel like lying’ offers a way out of sorts.

Proceedings really reach their peak at The Village, which offers the most Tunng-like moment with a bobbing undercurrent that pins down the subtly forceful vocals and gives a treat to both those looking for a chinstroke and a toe-tap before a twist and repeat of the final loop threatens to burst a brain cell or two before it lets go. Turbines in its entirety reveals itself as a sturdy, rather than stunning, album. While nothing flops across its nine tracks, equally there is nothing quite as joyful or intoxicating as past glories like Jenny Again or Hustle. Still though, their imagined village is one which is more than worth a visit.