Tarentel play fogbelt blues. They emulate daily life beneath a bad photocopy of a sky. While listening to their music, you can get the sense that wonderful events are happening within shouting distance-- standing under Heaven's cracked concrete floor can do that to you.
Through a post-rock mess of guitar drones, homemade brass instruments, and drums that knock on every door in a hallway, Tarentel oddly emulates the climate of their San Francisco hometown. We Move Through Weather, they claim on their fifth album. Not quite. Their music is trapped by weather-- like a solar car attempting to move a foot during an Arctic winter. Their sound is usually caught between long, droning periods of stasis, and then slightly melts and slides forward when 74-degree melodies and rhythms set in. It's fitting that Tarentel begin and end this album with a film projector scraping whatever celluloid fantasies it replayed into mere plastic noise-- the human memory can be fragile like that. But if only they didn't title their otherwise mature excursions as trash-flick soundtracks.
The opener, "Hello! We Move Through Weather!", stumbles into the bitter spring air. The song's sample of a dust-carpeted projector snaps its finger to teach the beat to a roiling tom-tom rhythm, and mixes with a Wurlitzer organ and guitars that squeal like after-hours drunks on a freeway. This exhaustive delirium crescendos and then fades into an uneasy comedown with jangling guitar melodies and violin tones that float like dust in sunlight. "Get Away From Me You Clouds of Doom" (how Whitman-esque), is an improv-skree number that's a nastier, more engrossing revisit to "Hello!"-- this time trudging through Babylon's streets with spring reverb'd guitar and long, high-pitched Wurlitzers chasing a thudding tom-tom rhythm. The 15-minute epic, "A Cloud No Bigger Than a Man's Hand", reverses the formula by opening with of murmuring woodwind and string drones. The music then locks into a tribal groove that opens a window to let artificially sweetened guitar melodies blow in and later dissolve into white noise.
Tarentel's amorphous but fragile sound is fallible to misfire. There is "Bump Past, Cut Up Through Windows", which tangos into a corner to an aimless Latin beat and redundant piano chords. "We're the Only Ghosts Here" follows a similar routine, but with longer-faced melancholy in its piano dirge, bass clarinet drones, and a filthier film projector clunking along.
We Move's best moment is too brief: "Klankity-Klank" is a brilliant minute-long ending-credits soundtrack; its percussion sounds like a stylus thunking on a warped vinyl groove while steam-powered, Faust-like guitar symphonics and digital pricks kick in. The imagination sees something different with each listen.
