Tender New Signs

Tender New Signs makes the listener work a little harder within Tamaryn's framework, but it rewards as much, if not more, than the walls of noise threatening to hem them in just a few years ago.

[The] second album painstakingly recreates the sounds and melodies of peak-era My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Joy Division with a slavish devotion that borders on the obsessive-compulsive. [Dec 2012, p.77]

Tamaryn is a nostalgic fan's daydream.

Whether it be the quaint elegance and flowing, reverb heavy guitars of kaleidoscopic opener 'I'm Gone' or claustrophobic haze of album standout 'Heavenly Bodies', there's little here that disappoints.

Tamaryn stay in their comfort zone on Tender, while doing their best to make us leave ours.

The only problem here is that the genre is taken to the extreme, and can blend together to the point where the album seems like one massive track.

Tender New Signs may be an exhausting listen but it is definitely a rewarding one.

Tender New Signs does not manifest the insistent post-punk rhythms of the Led Astray Washed Ashore EP (2011), but it's not a huge departure from 2010 debut The Waves, though its sound is less chiming and more grinding (in a good way), the ethereality present only in vocals rather than in general suffusion, the darkness lingering at the edges palpable where before it was merely hinted at.

The San Francisco-based duo's second album together hews closely to the dream pop/shoegaze formula.

This is a song cycle for those who like melancholy with a side of melodrama.

While Tender New Signs may not point you in any dramatically different directions than their debut did, it certainly displays a growing maturity in both Tamaryn and Shelverton.