New Single: Tepid Days - The Rot
Life can come thick and fast and it refuses to stop for anyone. Some of the hardest things to take as an adult resonate with us much more than those days where everything seems to have come together. Why are some of us so inadvertently altered by life's harsh lessons like a coastline being battered by the sea?
I think about this too much.
I read a book many years ago and there was a phrase from it that stuck with me. I'd recently lost someone very close to me and the pain was tangible. I knew that over time it would wain I'd be able to grieve in my own way, but I also knew that something had irreversibly changed within me, never likely to return again. The quote is from C.J Tudor's 'The Hiding Place'; a book that I had not really connected with until this hit me like a ton of bricks:
" People say time is a great healer. They're wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there's nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear."
Time can also be a great indicator.
It's fair to say that Liverpool's Tepid Days have not rushed to get their material in to the world. The project is primarily the work of Jamie Roberts, a musician who first showed signs of promise with his former band Wild Art Fruit Collection. It's taken Roberts the best part of four years to write material and get a stable collective together to flesh out the songs at his disposal; in fact the band have had over 20 members in that time before settling on the current group of Adam Craddock, Victoria Morris, Mali Anthony and Tom Shand.
Debut single 'The Rot' is a song that takes it's roots in the raw, complex emotions that follow a break up. Of course there is pain at the core of track, but it's also pensive and ponders the what might have changed as a result; the very notion of love itself is a victim to erosion too. The track is built around a cyclical bass and drum pattern with a infectious, sprightly synth sound that brings to mind Animal Collective and even, MGMT.
It's a remarkable feat considering the limitations that the band have had to contend with to get 'The Rot' recorded. Roberts explained further by saying:
“The only space we could afford to rent to record in was an empty warehouse unit in Birkenhead, it belonged to an old fishmonger and we could only spend [two] hours at a time tracking before we had to leave. We’d spend longer dragging our equipment over than we could spend recording! On vocal days, I’d be gagging between takes, and then the cockroaches moved in… I spent [four] years writing music and lyrics only to be dominated by the ghosts of old fish and creepy crawlies, it really became apparent, what are we doing with our lives?!”
Roberts doesn't have a vocal range that will win any awards, but the tone that he creates adds something else to this track that elevates it to another level. The recording manages to capture his levels of obvious despair, but also bemusement that he has attained in the writing process. There is a shift in tempo as the song evolves into a different beast late on.
The build of tension and release with the guitar much more prominent in the mix now, skirting around a Stooges-ish riff and perhaps further indicating the frustration at hand. The climax has Roberts yelping at the top of his lungs, finally allowing a moment of primal scream therapy to materialise before counting off a "1,2,3,4" back into the song's original loop. It's so good, I had to rewind it back and listen again. Not often does a lo-fi recorded debut single that has taken four years to come to life get it this right.
You can help support independent music writing by buying NNWNF a coffee at the Q.R code above. Mine's a metaphorical Flat White.
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