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Tulsa I Was Submerged Rating: 3.5/5 For fans of: My Morning Jacket |
On first listen, Tulsa’s debut, “I Was Submerged,” goes by very quickly, and not only because the album cuts out at just under a half hour. The band works with a heavy sound. Not metal heavy, but reverb heavy, with a slow, deliberate pacing and echoing, far-off vocals. Depending on your tastes, it can be either very easy to lose yourself in the crushing sonority or to just tune the whole thing out.
Vocalist Carter Tanton sings with a powerful yet ethereal timbre which perfectly matches the throbbing guitar work. To get a feel for Tanton’s voice, imagine a chorus of Ryan Adams minus some twang whispering and howling in an echoing underwater pool. In fact, with the restrained drums, heavy bass and oft-chanted vocals, Tulsa often evokes some kind of Buddhist-Radiohead meditation.
Tanton’s voice isn’t the only sunken component of “I Was Submerged.” Each track, in its own way, depicts waterlogged characters slowly drowning in lethargy. In fact, Tulsa is named not for the city (they’re part of the Boston scene), but for a photographic documentary created by Larry Clark in 1971, which portrays hopeless junkies, free-loving masochists and others who lived, and often died by their own hand, on the margins of society.
Tulsa is not afraid to dive into Clark’s world and paint all the grit there. On the chorus for “Breath Thin,” the opening song, Tanton wails with a sneaky creeping malice, “Time is not the devil,/ he has a hard time listening/ temptation throws his head back,/ violently tapping his foot, black./ Time is not the devil,/ oh, but I ain’t no saint, man/ settles his eyes into mine/ jaw clenched, breathless.”
Such chilling images of addicts, dying children and the like, sung with such airy tenor, are nearly overpowered by the weighty guitars and throbbing hypnotist bass, but when you come to realize what exactly Tanton is yowling about, the effect is especially eerie.
You must give “I Was Submerged” a few spins. Many will probably find the even, heavy, reverb-loaded music boring or good for little other than ambient background filler. Honestly, nothing on this album will stick with you after the first listen. Nothing particularly jumps out, and you likely won’t find yourself singing along.
However, if you immerse yourself, Tulsa becomes more exciting with each spin.