New Music From Tallies, duendita
Tallies
Tallies
(Kanine)
This writer has a very specific memory of watching the music video for “Joy” by the Sundays on MTV’s “120 Minutes” when it came out in 1990 and sharing his enthusiasm for it with a friend in German class the next day.
Clearly, the Sundays were heavily influenced by the Smiths—particularly in David Gavurin’s guitar parts that brought to mind Johnny Marr’s style—but there was a freshness to their sound that didn’t make them feel like a blatant rip-off, and that first Sundays album, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, still holds up perfectly today, 29 years later.
This critic brings this up because the new, self-titled debut album from the Toronto band Tallies is unable to avoid comparisons to the Sundays, much like the Sundays were unable to avoid comparisons to the Smiths.
This is no coincidence—lead guitarist Dylan Frankland of Tallies has mentioned that the band was listening to the aforementioned Sundays album a lot while writing its own album. Listen to the track “Midnight” and make no mistake about its origins, with its jangly strum and lead singer Sarah Cogan’s youthful yet assured vocals.
The fluid, kinetic, and restless bass lines of “Mother” play with subtle, artificial keyboard melodies and bright, ringing guitar lines, and the chorus charges forward with a snare-drum-on-every-beat rhythm and Cogan irresistibly singing with a clear pop voice with an effervescent quality, like champagne bubbles.
After the killer salvo of “Trouble”, “Mother”, and “Midnight,” the album remarkably holds its ground, although the consistency is broken up by the track “Giving Up”, sporting artificial beats that make it stick out uncomfortably.
On paper, Tallies sounds like it could be a rip-off of a rip-off, but when actually listening to the album, it hardly seems to matter—it’s a pure joy that lovingly tugs those strings within fans of British bands of the C86 era, dream-pop purveyors and even shoegaze acts like Slowdive and Moose in their more pop-oriented moments.
duendita
direct line to My Creator
(duendita.bandcamp.com)
The moniker of Queens, NYC artist duendita was taken from her nickname when she was studying the poet Federico García Lorca’s complex idea of “duende” in high school—a spontaneous, powerful, provocative, and inspirational feeling that encapsulates struggle and mortality.
Her debut, direct line to My Creator, covers topics including death, loss, spirituality, and love, but what really stands out is her vocal delivery; it’s moving, assertive yet tender and exposed, and she tests her own boundaries when diving into lower registers with a husky voice that balances out her more conventionally pretty singing.
A spiritual aspect permeates direct line to My Creator, even down to duendita’s deliberate lack of capitalization for anything that isn’t referring to God (including her own name), and perhaps evoking the album’s title, it opens with a solemnity as telephone touch-tones interrupt hallowed organ chords.
A cello and electric piano enter for the brief track “blue hands”, which was written in response to the shooting of Korryn Gaines after a standoff with police. While the mood and sounds are touching and comforting, the lyrical tension expresses an absolutely chilling dread over the possibility of dying at the titular hands of police.
In her own words, duendita describes her work as “weird and emotional” and “sweet and existential,” and her own duende is the key for taking in this music on a gut-feeling level. This is obliquely articulated on “pray” with the line “They don’t tell you when you’re young / How much it sucks to be numb,” with duendita singing over a simple beat; it blossoms impressively with her nimble vocals, harmonizing soulfully, and tasteful synths flooding the track with color.
Resisting the ability to be pigeonholed, duendita’s aural variety seems unforced and natural, both literally and figuratively, with occasional ambient nature sounds, like birdsongs and soft thunderstorms, among samples and beats or delicately echoing electric guitar lines.
The piano torch song “hurt so much” followed by “Magdalena”—about duendita’s late aunt—form an emotional apex without being overwrought. These are heavy topics, and in the face of adversity, one might consider being numb and detached.
However, duendita captures her struggles with both gravity and grace, meant to spark a connection and the wield the power of duende.