RIPPLES AND SWELLS

One of their LastFM tags is “fusion”. I won’t argue here, because it’s pretty true!

What do you think about Post-Rock? Dark music, played by acoustic instruments, long melancholic tracks with layered guitars and lengthy climaxes, blah-blah-blah…TUNA LAGUNA is nothing short of anything like it. If Post-Rock has drawn it’s main influence from Indie Rock, TL did that with fusion and Canterbury scene music. Post-Canterbury? You bet! Another attempt to describe band’s stuff could be this: if acid-jazz, there should be acid-fusion. Or acid dub-Canterbury. Or post-funk. No, I ain’t on acid myself now :)

TUNA LAGUNA have their unique sound – sometimes they sound like a James Bond score, with all these vibrato guitars and analogue organs, but background is usually powerful rhythm-section, almost electronic-sounding, as if taken directly from RED SNAPPER or 65DAYSOFSTATIC. Got the mixture? Add hella catchy melodies as well and a huge dose of humour and take away darkness, long tracks and other Post-Rock clichés. This is quite another thing, dude. Another beautiful thing concerning TL is they have plenty of tracks available for free download (on their LastFM page, for instance), like brilliant “My Lunar Boots”, and this opportunity would speak better than me about their music. Despite some mainstream/easy-listening approach, this groovy stuff deserves to be listened and appreciated. Highly recommended.

It's really difficult to try to classify Tuna Laguna as just a post rock band because the long list of styles that you'll find along the 10 tracks of this album. Perhaps the post rock rhythmical structures are present all the time, the psychedelic, some metalish moments, atmospherical sections and even a little bit of Zappa appears along this brilliant series of instrumental songs.

The opener is "My Lunar Boots", which interposes different melodic sections to build a very inetersting track that moves between a catchy melody and strong and complex rock sections which reminds me some Gastr del Sol albums. Into my favorites of this album, got to pick "Tidal Eddies" because the strong rhythmical base and the attmept to mix some "classic" post rock wirh psychedelic elements in a weird experiment that really works!

"Arrival of the Rhino" it's maybe the more hard, dark and metal-ish song of the album but doesn't lose the post rock base that build a solid and hard rhythmical base. "The Insignificant Grape" is a kind of pause at the middle of the album, a quiet and floating instrumental which leads to another great song of the album: "Feather Beats" another track that reminds me some Gastr del Sol and Tortoise early stuff but TL add their own an particular ingredients to turn that song into a really funny musical journey.

The album closes with another two great pieces: "Barry on Safari" and "That's Where We're at". Both songs has the mentioned elements and gives a real good ending to this underrated album that deserves to be into the colection of every average post rock fan... 4*

TUNA LAGUNA were a rather large six piece Post-Rock band with two guitarists, two keyboardists, along with bass and drums. This is their second and perhaps final release from 2007. We get close to 50 minutes of music over ten tracks. This is a fairly poppy all instrumental album with bright sounding keys and synths at times. I just didn't get a very good first impression but as usual repeated listens change some of that. There is a guest playing trombone on "Tidal Eddies" which is my favourite song on here. I wish there was more trombone on this. Probably the first time I've uttered those words.

"My Lunar Boots" is the six minute opener that is a great example of how bright and poppy this album sounds. Happy is the word here. "Feather Beats" and "Barry On Safari" are energetic and punchy. "On To Tarmac" is rather funky while the one heavy track is aptly titled "Arrival Of The Rhino" with those crazy opening synths. We get a good closer called "That's Where We're At" with some excellent drumming. Some reference THE SAMUEL JACKSON FIVE which I do get, they were contemporaries, but man I much prefer THE SAMUEL JACKSON FIVE, and that's my "go to" for happy Post Rock.