After the exciting discovery of Wasabisabi I was intrigued to see what 2419 were offering on this, the 50th odd album in their quest to release 2419 records (before shutting down). Clearly they’re not going to manage that because by then we’ll all be living underground wearing each others flesh and worshipping broken technology, but let’s bear with them till then.
Name-checking Hendrix as an influence is a balls-y move because while he may well be an influence for you (and every other guitar player in the last 50 years) what it says is that secretly (deep down) we think we’re as good. Tunnelbirds are not as good as Hendrix. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean they suck because a lot of bands could be described as “not as good as Hendrix” but Tunnelbirds fall pretty far short of the mark.
The singing is passable but at times is dangerously close to pastiche. I even thought occasionally that it sounded like an English guy singing in an American accent but this is not the case. The guitar playing is nothing special and (like the drums) to some extent could be described as charmingly ramshackle or utterly bog standard. They also don’t do themselves any favours with lyrics like “You, I wanna be touched by you, You, I wanna be touched by you, But you gotta be sure that you wanna touch me too”.
When you throw in the fact that there isn’t really a hugely memorable song in there, or anything that you haven’t heard done a million times before, it does make you wonder who makes this music and why.
10,000 dodecahedrons
http://2419.nl/ALBUMS/Tunnelbirds
Kim Monaghan
That last part looks like a riddle or something.
Dodecahedrons ?