Tender New Signs

Tender New Signs is full of cracking tunes that help avoid the formlessness that effects-laden atmo-pop often slumps into. [Dec 2012, p.113]

All nine of these slow-moving cuts are built on actual melodies, simple enough to stick right away, radiant enough to hang like this album's overtones, well after they are finished.

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.

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

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] 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]

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.

Tamaryn is a nostalgic fan's daydream.

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.

Nothing wrong with clearly highlighting your influences, although you do run the risk of reminding listeners why said influences are better.

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

On the whole, Tender Signs struggles to get beyond the level of an immersive period piece.

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.

It's cinematic, dramatic, and has vocals so indistinct that Tamaryn (the singer whose band this is) could just be coo-ing "turn up the smoke machine" over and over again.