VIDEO: Tulsa, "Shaker"
Two years later, I’m in the basement of that same Allston house, out of which I’ve since moved, drinking Busch beers and smoking cigarettes with Tanton and Erik Wormwood, the bassist in Tanton’s newest band, Tulsa, who came together during that fall of 2005. (Drummer Greg Hatem couldn’t make it.) I tell Tanton about the shock I felt on hearing him sing for the first time and how I think his soft-spokenness is at odds with his on-stage demeanor. “I don’t think that’s a rarity,” he says. “There’s that eternal contradiction in people who feel the need to perform: half of you doesn’t want to do it, half of you is petrified. And half of you feels incomplete without doing it. You kind of set yourself up for a really tumultuous life.”
Like Tanton’s opposing halves, Tulsa’s music is marked by a sort of push-pull between melody and dissonance, concision and unhinged sonic exploration. Tanton cites an instinctual drive to write tightly structured pop tunes, but he’s also turned on by playing longer, freer songs, music that breathes and flows. Their new EP — I Was Submerged, their second for Philly-based Park the Van Records, the release of which they celebrate upstairs at the Middle East this Tuesday — leans more toward the pop end of the spectrum. “Shaker” — one of the EP’s best — is based on a couple of simple, tuneful melodies, and it’s over in less than four minutes.
But Tanton and Wormwood say they’re headed in the other direction, especially since guitar/keys player Marc Pinansky — a rock classicist at heart — left to focus on his band Township. (Tanton used to play in Township, but he and Pinansky decided to devote themselves fully to their respective primary projects.) Tanton points to Hatem — who grew up listening to and playing krautrock-influenced psychedelic and noise music — as leading the charge to the left of the center. “I really want to have long songs — that’s something I’ve never been able to feel comfortable doing. If you play a three-minute song, it’s done before you know it. Just when it’s over is when you’re finally feeling comfortable with it. But no matter how much we try to take it into that realm, there’s still going to be catchy songs. It’s just inevitable, I think — that’s the way I sing. I feel like I have to leave that print on a song. If I open my mouth, I want it to be, if not catchy, just, like, memorable.”
Wormwood adds, “A lot of my favorite bands do that really well. There’s that dichotomy between those two different sides — the things that are really easy to understand and grasp and the things that are kind of beyond you and wash over you but you still kind of feel it. Songs can hit you in so many different ways. The melody, the lyrics, can hit you, but I think we’re trying to explore more how the sounds and the sonics can hit you, the overall noise of it, without being too weird.”
There’s Tanton’s skill at crafting a memorable melody, but there’s also the band’s sound — a warm, delay-and-echo-drenched swirl that has remained consistent from their first EP, Hunting with Cats, which Tanton recorded himself, to I Was Submerged, which Jack Younger recorded at his Basement 247 studio in Allston, to their live shows. “We could not play a show without my delay pedal [an old Electro-Harmonix Memory Man],” Tanton says, laughing. “If my delay pedal broke, we’d have to cancel the show.”
