Seattle art-punk trio Talbot Tagora clearly understand the importance of a moniker. Naming themselves for a defunct European car that valued practicality over style yet was not practical enough (i.e., gas-efficient) to withstand the late-1970s energy crisis, the band announces its interest in the mechanical, the proletariat, and the cruelly ironic. And the title of the self-released CD-R/tape veterans' proper debut for Hardly Art, Lessons in the Woods or a City, hints at the mysterious, primal menace and noisy, urban clamor contained within. Talbot Tagora are disciples of No Age's muddy, muddled punk, but take their psych-drenched sounds out of sunny, smoggy Los Angeles and into the Pacific Northwest, where the metallic clang of big-city life rings out through thick cloud cover and lush, sound-absorbent forests. The glue, then, of their first widely available collection is an echoey sludge that envelops every track, making it sound like the band is bashing away at their instruments from the bottom of a well or conducting a particularly raucous practice underwater.
Songs bleed into one another, as the wiry, high-pitched guitars and flatly thudding drums pervade every track and fade out into blustery dissonance at the end of each song, and lyrics are mostly indistinguishable thanks to their nasal, blunted delivery and the highly distorted microphones the band uses. Only occasionally do you hear a smattering of verbiage-- "Park your vehicle under Tiger Mountain with the swastikas and the glass all over," "We can choose to go to hell if we want to. Yes, he like's this. He's a masochist," "Break me out of jail"-- that only adds to the sense of sinister aggression that prevails throughout. Talbot Tagora create a dense thicket of tinny guitar riffs (which are too repetitive to be abstract, yet too unstructured or amelodic to be pop), dirty basslines, and jittery, thumping percussion that all-too-often races ahead of the beat so that the other instruments sound like they are breathlessly trying to catch up. There is, therefore, a sameness that saturates the album; no track deviates from the unwavering intensity. And thus, the record is better digested in its entirety, rather than song-by-song.
The uniformity isn't a bad thing, though, and there some tracks that stand out from the rest. "Johnny Lazor" gallops along on propulsive, shuffling drums and a distorted walking guitar line that is mimicked in the taunted vocal melody. "Mouth Rainboy" is built on ticky-tacky stickwork and churning, churlish guitars, and is one of the few songs that listeners can sing along with since its few lyrics are almost audible and chanted repeatedly. And "Perception Stick", with its simplified (and relatively slow) 60s rock beat and dry, monotone boy/girl singing, feels like an homage to Sonic Youth circa Daydream Nation.
The band has a timeless punk set-up of just guitar, bass, and drums, but there is something futuristic about their sound, as the heavy reverb lends a silvery patina to everything from the stabbing guitar lines to the opaque co-ed vocals. And with songs that are raw and antagonistic, yet dreamy and droning, Talbot Tagora fulfill the destiny of their namesake: There is no pretense in their simple arrangements, but you can hear their motor revving, and you know they'll never run out of gas.
