The Indiana-based quintet Tammar were once a group without a name, an improvisational outfit shifting freely around frontman Dave Walter's nebulous kernels of songs. Five years and two indecisive EPs later, Tammar make structured and sturdy rock music driven by what still feels like an on-the-fly soul. On Visits, the band's confident debut studio LP, swollen drones and surprising subtleties temper the epic impulses on tunes that, in less artful hands, might be overly grandiose anthems gone wrong. Appropriate for a group that began with free-music explorations, Tammar intuit when to build, when to change, and when to collapse. Never obvious or predictable, the band crafts songs that aren't boring, but also aren't too big. Like Spacemen 3 with Wembley Stadium aspirations.
Indeed, most every tune on Visits leaves its indelible mark, bursts of melody that linger long after the song itself has expired. But six of these seven tracks break the five-minute mark, meaning that Tammar depend on much more than hooks for the 44 minutes. "Deep Witness" creaks open with a keyboard hum, eventually abetted by the sound of a glowing guitar amplifier and a snare slap that seems set for infinity. Walter delivers a barely decipherable refrain-- something about not being able to slow down and maybe a bit about kissing, too-- three times, and it sticks. The focus, though, is the atmosphere, or the way those iterations of the slogan refract into these fierce instrumental movements. Tammar even have the thankful audacity to open Visits with "Heavy Tonight", their least immediate and maybe most involved tune. The drums twist in circles while an organ growls, both doing their best to push Walter's vocals into the background. The song feels like a massive sonic blur, as if Neu! were handed the master tapes of a 1970s album rock trove and a commission to remix at will. "Summer Fun" is the shortest tune here by a minute and the most radio-ready by a mile. Still, it depends more on its shifting components-- an irascible bassline that won't sit still, hand claps that demand space alongside the snapping drums, and guitars that spiral like the dB's before surging like Slint-- than its hook.
Tammar take full advantage of this proper debut platform, trading the low-key, mid-fidelity aspect of their EPs for sessions that reinforce their ideas with volume and power. Mike Bridavsky captures the breadth of the band's palette, while the excellent mixing of former Zero Boy Paul Mahern puts each simple layer in full, perfect focus. You can hear the ingenuity and purpose in the drone that fades at the end of "The Last Line" and phoenixes at the start of "Deep Witness". (This move smartly echoes the War on Drugs, a band signed to Tammar keyboardist Ben Swanson's label Secretly Canadian.) You can feel the colossal rhythmic shifts within the humming-to-howling "Yung Jun". Closer "Frost Meter" begins as a delicate web of twinkling guitar, repeating loops, drifting vocals, and teasing percussion. By the time it reaches the four-minute mark, it's a throttling tune with a Motorik insistence and a Johnny Lydon sneer. Tammar lose nothing between those poles because they carefully develop and deliver each layer-- a five-piece with five members writing their own interesting parts but coming together for a common good. In short, these are good songs given license to be something much bigger and more consuming.
