Ashtray Navigations & Anla Courtis, Tennis Club
Ashtray Navigations & Anla Courtis
Protozoic Rock Express
(Public Eyesore)
While most musicians measure time with beats, for the duo of Phil Todd—known as the main force behind the prolific Ashtray Navigations—and Anla Courtis (known as a member of Reynols), their complicated, collaborative drones have their own subtle rhythms that slowly form crests and dips; it’s more like the breathing patterns of whales instead of the hummingbird’s heartbeat of, say, pop music.
The new album Protozoic Rock Express was compiled from recordings made between 2004 and 2010 in Leeds (U.K.) and Buenos Aires, Argentina, which are the respective homes of Ashtray Navigations and Courtis.
The gentle unraveling and slow reveals provide a soundtrack for strange meditations and also aural Rorschach inkblot test mind-movies; armchair psychologists doing self-analysis can likely amuse themselves by trying to understand why these sounds inspire the personal, fabricated visions that they do.
For example, the 22-minute “Part III” uses tones that resemble the rising and falling pitches of disaster sirens, like those that provide warnings for tsunamis and tornadoes. Interestingly, when these tones are overlaid, they create tension, but there’s enough space to zoom in on individual tones, which have their own odd tranquility to them.
Atop the drones are some lightly popping sounds—exploding transformers, miles away?—distorted guitars, ominous rumbling and synthetic non-human yells that evolve into screams. Just a few peaks emerge within the long piece, like when the tone pitches climb to their highest notes (an old musical trick for representing an emotional peak) or when there are quicker variations in tones.
On “Part I”, there’s a blurry sound-fog, made with drones or vibrating pieces of metal, with a few sharp details that sparkle—tinny tinkles, squeaks or shakes of hand-held percussion—like potentially salvageable shards, temporarily illuminated in a giant landfill trash heap being manipulated by bulldozers.
“Part II” could be a bizarro universe raga, with what sounds like harmonium drones along with string and oscillator drones, with a slow envelope effect being just one driver for its atypical cycles. Things happen on both a micro and macro level, and regarding the album’s immersive experience and potential psychological mirror, your results may and should vary wildly.
Tennis Club
Pink
(Elefant)
What the hell, people—this writer was a bit shocked to hear that summer break is almost over for Hamilton County Schools students and parents, and he hasn’t even gone swimming or had an outdoor grill-cooked burger once this season. This is pathetic, and clearly, this writer’s priorities are out of whack.
Maybe that’s why the new mini-album Pink from the Joplin, Missouri trio Tennis Club is hitting the spot right now, for the inner child that is kicking and screaming and trying to extend carefree summer vibes and fruitlessly postpone the inevitable.
Led by the guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter Wilson Hernandez, Tennis Club plays unfussy indie-pop with surf-rock flourishes—you’ve heard all the elements before, from the tried-and-true basic three-chord pop progressions, the nostalgic ‘60s garage-rock reverb, the jaunty beats and unabashed tambourine shakes.
The songs are typically short and to-the-point, with only one song lasting more than three minutes; the 60-second “Mexico City (Rich Girls)” is sung in Spanish, and right when the song is over, you want to hear it again. “Ghost Cops” is pretty darn irresistible, with sung “ooohs,” handclaps and jangly accents, and although the drums sound a bit like cardboard, that doesn’t stop drummer Sean O’Dell from recreating a “Wipe Out”-esque fury.
The lyrics are almost hilariously juvenile on purpose, expressing the limited, somewhat awkward emotional sophistication of an 8th grader with broad strokes and basic phrases, like “she treats me bad” and “don’t hurt me again” and “I can’t dance” and “I wanna die!”
However, on “Baby”, Hernandez sings of a girl with “champagne colored eyes,” offering an odd type of affection: “My baby spends her drug money on me.” Back in eighth grade, that would have been lunch money; now that we’re adults, some things have changed, but the root emotions haven’t