STILL SINGLE

A space for thoughts on music and culture, as written by Doug Mosurock and a select handful of individuals. This is intended as a supplement to our regular feature Still Single, published on Dusted Magazine. Updates will run here more frequently, and may feature writing on music not covered in the column. Compact discs are still not accepted for review -- we have more than enough vinyl and the occasional cassette to worry about. Our Twitter feed keeps you apprised of reviews as they're published. It's kept locked and private, because with a name like @stillsingle, everyone thinks it's a dating site. Approvals happen whenever they happen.

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October 9, 2012

Tomten – Ta Ta Dana 10” EP (Flat Field)

The jury has deliberated for a matter of minutes and returned with a verdict for this 10” and the Tomten discography as a whole: this Seattle quartet is guilty of adult-contemporary non-music that adheres to a distinct strain of the hydra-headed cultural clusterfuck marketed as the “I”-word. If luck found this combo, the civilian casualties of said 100% mainstream “indie” plague would blindly gobble up Tomten’s lifeless mix of everything you’ve already forgotten about Girls combined with everything you’ve long forgot about Belle and Sebastian (to clarify: the disposable filler punctuating those band’s disparate discographies). Something new happens when I read a list of SEO-optimized search tags on a Bandcamp page like “baroque pop dream pop electric folk indie rock vintage pop Seattle,” as Tomten has so vaguely identified on their own. I automatically and permanently let it serve as a major red flag. Why is this? That’s an honest, but one-sided, question (unless someone actually wants to waste their time emailing me a theory or two) question, though I have found that rock-based music following the same trend as Tomten can no longer be saved by amazing songwriting or towering hooks (this 10” contains nothing of the sort, btw). That is pretty scary, people. Black vinyl. (http://www.flatfieldrecords.com)
(Andrew Earles)

7 months ago • 0 notes