"If there's any justice, Black Tambourine will see their name inserted into revisionist histories of American independent rock." So wrote Pitchfork's Chris Ott in his April 1999 review of Black Tambourine's Complete Recordings, and at the time, the line sounded like wishful thinking. After all, that compilation of the Washington, D.C. band's brief, brilliant career didn't surface at the most opportune time for a reassessment, given pre-millennial indie rock's aesthetic drift away from fuzz-covered slop-pop toward exploratory instrumentals (Tortoise, Mogwai) and folky formalism (Belle and Sebastian, Elliott Smith). But the arrival of this reissue of that reissue-- which supplements the Complete Recordings tracklist with two demos and four unearthed tracks-- confirms that revisionist history is now real. Not only does it mark the 20th anniversaries of the band and its Slumberland imprint, but also the renewed ubiquity of Black Tambourine's sound in certain contemporary indie pop circles.
And yet even with their emergent iconic status, it's hard to say if Black Tambourine were ahead of their time or simply out of place. The music they created was novel not necessarily for its era-- forming in 1989, they essentially modeled themselves on the girl-group/post-punk collision instigated by the Jesus and Mary Chain and the C86 set-- but its point of origin, making them anomalies in a D.C. scene very much beholden to Dischord-schooled hardcore. Their history thus mirrors that of cult touchstones ranging from mid-60s Nuggets bands to Big Star: American Anglophiles operating in relative isolation, translating their out-of-step influences into flashes of inspired songcraft before quickly flaming out in a sigh of indifference, only to be survived by future generations of record-collecting converts.
If the 20-year-old songs compiled on Black Tambourine still sound strikingly contemporary, it probably has less to do with the band's own foresight and more to do with modern indie's retreat into lo-fi insularity. But so long as timid young rock bands choose to hide their innermost emotions behind a foggy veil of feedback, songs like the urgently despairing "For Ex-Lovers Only", the hypnotically propulsive "By Tomorrow", and the giddily expressed girlfriend murder fantasy "Throw Aggi Off the Bridge" will forever stand as paragons of the form.
That Complete Recordings has long gone out of print makes Black Tambourine an essential acquisition for current In the Red, Woodsist, and Slumberland loyalists. And even for old-school adherents, the bonus tracks included warrant a repurchase. Never mind the demos for "Ex-Lovers" and "Aggi", which merely present these already crudely rendered songs in more severe states of tape decay. The four previously unreleased tracks-- new recordings by the original line-up of old, undocumented set-list standards-- fit seamlessly alongside the vintage material both in terms of quality and fidelity: a pair of upbeat distorto-pop jaunts ("Lazy Heart", "Tears of Joy") as immediately engaging as anything in their canon, plus raucous but reverential covers of Buddy Holly ("Heart Beat") and Suicide ("Dream Baby Dream") that map out the pop/drone polarities of Black Tambourine's sound world. For a band whose legend was initially built on two officially released singles, these quality extras should be more than enough to see us through to the 2030 reunion tour.
