If Tunng had any more bells and whistles they’d be able to open a bell-and-whistle shop. A big one. As such, though, they’re one of the most percussively over-engineered yet deceptively and beautifully simple bands I’ve heard.
They bury plaintive, repetitive vocal hooks inside chiming pastoral guitars. On top of this they start a Tourette’s avalanche of electronic beeps, squeaks and hiccups. The whole thing is oddly heartwarming and touching. I saw them live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the Purcell Rooms – nice big comfy seats) and it it was even better to discover that they wren’t a bunch of rural hobbits, or dungeons and dragons-playing Womad’s. Not all of them anyway. One guitarist looked like he was partial to ale. And cheese. And mandolins. But the others looked quite….cool. And funny, too.
About half way through the gig something in the hypnotic melodies reminded me that I’d already seen them before, at the Green Man festival last year. Memories of hazy, damp Saturday afternoon’s came back to me. And then I started to wonder if I hadn’t seen them many, many times before that. The haunting, cyclical, almost Gregorian chant of the music makes them sound as if they been lingering in the mists of time for hundreds of years, harking back to Henry VIII’s Greensleeves, sitting round campfires in windswept landscapes, constantly considering another flaggon of Old Peculiar.
They’re doing a ton of gigs this year, check out their website to read more. They might even have grown some proper grey, straggly, perhaos even plaited beards by then…