A lot of people are making music influenced by trip-hop right now, and a lot of it is very good. But it typically skews towards the sultry meeting point of sexual danger and stoned paranoia with the razor-sharp aesthetic edges of the ’90s and ’00s internet. Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Trio are steeped in their hometown’s trip-hop tradition, but their approach is more folk-rock than the voluptuous blues associated with Tricky or Massive Attack. They make music for autumnal scenes with scarves and coffee rather than a time loop where you’re always ashing the same spliff. Car-stereo stuff like Dido and Beth Orton sometimes comes to mind. It’s almost twee.
Somehow, this approach makes their second album, Somewhere Good, sound slipperier and more intriguing than if they’d leaned towards the darker end of their influences. Their approach is to unspool songs over five or six minutes, letting electronics blur with live instrumentations in an uncanny singularity, as errant samples drift alongside. That describes a lot of trip-hop, but it’s more surprising in the context of music that sounds almost adult contemporary.
This sound locked in on 2023’s brilliant EP, On the Turning Ground, whose songs started out like folk ballads and then stripped away the acoustic guitars to reveal their rubbery guts. Somewhere Good is a suspension of those ideas, neither insular nor showy, an exertion of quiet selfhood. It goes down as easy as a lot of records that sell millions of copies in ballad-loving Britain, but there’s a riot of invention going on within these eight songs. Patrick Benjamin favors elastic synth-bass patches that turn themselves inside out as if by some octopus will. There’s a hyperreal gleam to Clerkin’s guitar—acoustic but with none of the grain, a coffee-shop Henry Kaiser—and her guitar parts appear and vanish at will, like errant loops scattered on a digital audio workstation.
It’s remarkable, for an album that carries itself as pop, how much of Somewhere Good is spent in instrumental space. Clerkin’s hooks are simple and sketched-out (“When did you decide?”), but they sound even sweeter when you realize you haven’t heard a vocal in upwards of five minutes. When Clerkin isn’t singing or playing guitar, she’s coaxing strange sounds from the sample pad she keeps at the ready at shows. Just when you think “Ups & Downs” has run out of surprises as it drifts through quiet piano ambience and an unexpected uptempo swing towards Twin Peaks patter, the band introduces a sample that sounds like it was sourced from a boy’s choir, which twists and vanishes as the song peters out in its sixth minute.
The music wanders from neighborhood to neighborhood like a walker in a quiet city, and its mesmeric pace befits its sleepily urban perspective. Not a lot of bands continue to write songs about their local scene when they reach a certain level of success, but on “Slow Island,” Clerkin and her partner/bandmate Sunny Joe Paradisos find room in their heart to ache for the transience of the DIY scene that birthed them. “It’s getting harder and harder to recognize my town/Everything I used to know has been torn down,” Paradisos sings. It’s delightful to hear these concerns expressed within the context of a classic boy-girl pop duet; the xx sounded a little like this, but they weren’t singing about their favorite bars shutting down.
Somewhere Good is a triumph of restrained invention, but one of its most exciting tracks is also its silliest. That would be “Movin’ On,” a sort of double-time dub in which Clerkin has as much fun smashing open her sound library as Lee “Scratch” Perry did on Roast Fish. The margins flood with water sounds, and clipped samples of what sounds like circus music contort themselves in the background. Suddenly you’re in the sewers from The Third Man or The Fugitive, dwarfed by the din of urban infrastructure. But somehow the jaunty stride of the music assures you’re going to be OK, you’re going to drift to safety, and that’s a rare thing to feel from music as experimental as this.
