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(2016) Three Trapped Tigers - Silent Earthling
Review:
…If you try and play both the electronic and rock sides of the instrumental landscape then you end up putting yourself on the same page as luminaries like Pink Floyd and Radiohead. Yet Three Trapped Tigers have somehow managed to carve a distinct niche for themselves amongst this network of genres. In their work, motifs are played out in variations more like classical music than popular. Their songs are never sprawling, generally sticking to about the five-minute mark but packing as much as possible in: are they deliberately trying to ensure that no space for vocals is left, as if to prove their worth as a solely instrumental act?
Take the title track of this, their second album, for example. The song unfolds in rapidly emerging layers, starting with ambient tones, then introducing a heavy drumbeat, a dose of sub-bass, shimmering synth sounds and space rock guitar riffage. It all builds up to something epic sounding within a minute, where a post-rock band like Explosions in the Sky would take a lot longer to get to that point in a track. But because this is Three Trapped Tigers, the song then goes somewhere else, with various patterns of electronics overlaying each other. Then there’s something that might be a middle eight if we think of this as rock music, or a breakdown if we consider it electronic, before the epic theme reprises for the final time.
In Kraken we encounter guitar riffs echoing synth patterns in. Can a guitar play patterns and a synth play riffs? This is perhaps something we are invited to question. In Engrams we hear chiming chords and anologue synths reminiscent of Four Tet, then guitars that sounds like early Foals, while dreamier closing track Elsewhere sounds like it could plausibly be a remix of something from Foals’ recent stadium filling album What Went Down.
Much ground is covered here, and many comparisons come to mind, ranging from math rock newcomers The Physics House Band, the hauntological experiments of Leyland Kirby, and video game soundtracks. But in this urgent, dense, ambient, technical music Three Trapped Tigers have produced something that is very much their own.
Tracklist:
01 Silent Earthling.flac
02 Strebek.flac
03 Kraken.flac
04 Blimp.flac
05 Engrams.flac
06 Tekkers.flac
07 Hemisphere.flac
08 Rainbow Road.flac
09 Elsewhere.flac
Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: electronic, post-rock
Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~ 890-993 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits |
