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Psapp - Tiger, My Friend (Domino), Published in NARC. #19

Domino have gone and re-issued Psapp’s 2004 effort Tiger, My Friend, so for those that missed it first time around, here’s a second chance to bask in the soft, mellow electronica of London’s Carim Clasmann and Galia Durant.

You’ll find all kinds of noises on this album, from rubber ducks squeaking and toy guitars, to computers beeping and finger pianos, with gentle and innocent vocals floating along the top of the sea of music. Psapp are famed for making music from all kinds of toys and toy instruments, so on every listen, you’re still picking out different sounds that you didn’t hear the last time and trying to place what exactly it is you can hear.

The album opens with the noises from a street, quickly followed up by Rear Moth, which sweeps along with what I can only imagine is a stuffed monkey toy in a waistcoat, with cymbals, proudly marching alongside the song with a giant grin on his face.

Next up, the mood changes, with the beautifully forlorn Leaving In Coffins. A song about forsaken love and friends with “Now all the things I hold dear to me are falling off in pieces”, Durant literally breaking her heart with her delivery. Meanwhile, on Calm Down, we have the type of music you’d find rotating in the carousel of a cot, whilst with the next song, Velvet Pony, it’s all about the wondrous noise you might find when dusting off and opening a music box that breaks through the cobwebs to show a twirling ballerina.

About Fun introduces us to Psapp’s cat obsession, with squeaking toys and feline sound effects strutting along for a day out to the park or the zoo and wanting “a bowl of cold milk, a different point of view, let's have a bite of raw meat”. Then Curuncula, my favourite song on the album, starts off with a clicking beat and a folk guitar, telling the tale of a couple stumbling and faking their way through their lives, with the simple, but frankly stark and truthful chorus of “we have only ourselves, only ourselves to blame”.

And so it carries on with the break up of King Kong, Durant stating emphatically, “one of us is leaving and it won’t be me”. The album is very much, in their own words, an album all about insecurity, loneliness and disappointment. Fortunately though, the vocals are so sincere and sweet, the music so challenging and inventive, that you’re left far from wanting to top yourself, despite the recurring themes. Instead, you’re left to listen again and again, delving deeper and deeper into the sounds, the lyrics, and the meaning and significance of it all.

Usually I associate the noise of clinking bottles, squeaky toys and squealing cats with some sort of adventure that my dog might be bumbling through in her sleep, but this time it’s an adventure all of my own. Tiger, My Friend is a great piece of work, definitely worth your time and money.

4/5



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