So smitten with the original, vinyl-only pressing of Tum last year, this reviewer slapped it on his Top Twenty Of 2005 list and mothballed the bitch for a few months. Now, perusing the CD version, the reason for its high placement on a highly competitive list is even more obvious. Likening The Impossible Shapes' latest to another 2005 release of the band's, Horus, is somewhat like the plot of an omnipresent deodorant commercial – one of those Selsun Blue-esque TV ads that's so bad you can't purge it from your memory – that goes something like this: Horus STINKS. Tum WORKS.
It's not that Horus is bad, per se, it just didn't receive the lambasting it deserved for being a below-average album forged from the smelt of a remarkable indie-rock songsmithing unit. Whipped up in a jiffy by a band apparently liberated by the old-timey feel of jamming in a garage sans any specific directive, Tum's sharp corners, rough edges, unsanded contours, mysterious crevasses, and spontaneous bent consummate – sheeyite, commemorate is more like it – a rebirth of sorts for a band with a promising resumé of (now) six full-lengths and several tours.
Lurching ahead slowly at first with a toss-off ("Ra in the Rising"), a mid-tempo alt-rocker ("Florida Silver Springs"), and another bloody toss-off ("The Working Vessel"), Tum's tumultuous ebb doesn't really ripen until "Pixie Pride," a twinkling bat of the eyelash that flashes its fuzzy allure slowly, succinctly; seven or eight listens and you'll get it, but until then its stuttering reverb and nasal vocals will sound cavalier.
The same goes for the tippy-toe, doe-eyed instrumental "Fulgent Fields," a seemingly meaningless track that – again, after several listens – eventually serves to tie the whole rash of tracks into a neat little bundle with its almost Adult Acoustic Contemporary Instrumental glow and sultry strings. Skip from song to song and this theme continues: Sloppy Joe flows and multiple diversions over the course of 17 movements that contain nary a rhyme nor a reason.
This is only a ruse, however; Tum's petals unfurl a delicate beauty, a hidden verve lying in wait for just the right moment – just the right passage to spring upon the listener jubilantly. It starts to unfold within the stilted, uncannily personal nooks and crannies of slow-waltzer "Late Summer Sky" and re-ups with the shakers 'n' twang of "Twisted Sol Epoch," leaping into an unexpected late-album throb with classic Shapes stomp "Willow, Willow You" and the desperate lone balladry of the title track, a bittersweet, hallowed acoustic number that asserts, "I've been here breathing fire/ just watching; no desire/ I have a lot of hope/ I know you do, too/ I felt a fool at times/ not noticing the signs/ believing in a ghost /I've grown out of that now."
In themselves the lyrics don't read like pretentious, drunken-boat prose – that's the charm of Tum. It spits out one-off audio entries that initially sound cobbled together and coarse, only to expand into a definitive collection of tracks that couldn't have been sequenced any other way. It clutches passages that would serve as boring, between-song filler with any other band and morphs them into essential components of a brief-but-cutting recorded work. It doesn't bowl you backward with huge, bloated production values, overwrought instrumentation/arranging, or pompous, "This is so over your head it's genius" wordplay... it just is... and that fact is reason enough for those frustrated with same-y, toothless alt-kuntrey rock to rejoice. If only more rockers would put down the thousand-dollar compressors and pitch-altering equipment and go back to the garage.
1. Ra In Thy Rising
2. Florida Silver Springs
3. Working Vessel, The
4. Pixie Pride
5. Fulgent Fields
6. Tahuti, Splendid Scribe
7. Late Summer Sky
8. Kephra
9. Hornbeam
10. Pan-ther
11. Wild West Wake Us Up
12. Hather
13. Our Love Lives
14. Twisted Sol Epoch
15. Willow Willow Yew
16. Little Gloves
17. Tum
More about: The Impossible Shapes
