Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Band once had eight members, until five of them “un-joined,” leaving the eponymous Clerkin and brothers Sunny-Joe Paradiso and Patrick Benjamin as the Tara Clerkin Trio. Listening to the trio’s instrumental puzzles, it’s hard to imagine where you’d wedge five more pieces: This is slow, airy music that nonetheless teems with life, the jazz-folk equivalent of a Kelly Reichardt movie. Their new EP, On the Turning Ground, ambles through blissful psych-pop and washed-out breakbeats, harpsichord interludes and dubby balladry. Every new idea seems like a natural progression, as if you’d slowly wandered deeper into a verdant reserve.
Tara Clerkin Trio’s self-titled 2020 debut was chic, nonchalant city music: The sinister gem “I Know He Will” felt like a live recording captured in a jazz club that shared a thin wall with a takeaway kitchen. Throughout the record, disparate sounds garbled and interweaved, capturing a sense of higgledy-piggledy beauty. On the Turning Ground is clearly still inspired by Bristol—the opening song is called “Brigstow,” an earlier form of the city’s name, and “The Turning Ground” is animated by the kind of breakbeat usually found in its famed d’n’b clubs—but it’s more wide-ranging, too, using synthetic sounds to mimic the slowness and stillness of the natural world. Paradiso’s snare brushes on “Brigstow” sound like leaves crunching underfoot; stabs of cello and melodica are like distant bird calls. On “World in Delay,” crackling dub production becomes a mirror of Clerkin’s lyrics, which look to botanic renewal as a sign of hope: “Only flowers on the tree/A remedy/Waiting for the new copy/Does it feel nearly real?”
Clerkin’s words tend toward abstraction, but certain motifs recur. On “The Turning Ground,” she again seems to find solace in the passing seasons (“In another time/I’m new again”); on “Marble Walls” she sings of finding comfort in the echoing sounds of a church choir. Clerkin has a sweet, hard-to-pin-down voice: She’s prone to slowly, steadily drawing out syllables, like a less urbane Anna Domino, and sometimes sings with a Trish Keenan-esque sing-song quality.
Mostly, Clerkin’s voice is an essential textural element; despite its chilly production, On The Turning Ground feels profoundly hopeful, and Clerkin’s high, resonant voice, when it pops up, feels like spring blooms cropping up between patches of frost. But even in its sparsest moments, On the Turning Ground seems to nod to a universe that’s constantly growing and expanding, even when things might feel static. On closer “Once Around,” a loop of Clerkin’s guitar is slowly surrounded by more and more echo, with such subtlety that at first you might not even notice it. Eventually, washes of synth spread underneath, and cello and harpsichord eventually subsume the guitar entirely. It’s the most melancholy song on the EP, and the most beautiful—incremental change and renewal, happening before your very ears.
