Tambersauro, Theories of Delusional Origin

Improvised (or even improvised-sounding) music makes my skin crawl. Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration — I don’t really find it creepy, per se, but it just kind of irks me, in the same way that, say, driving around town aimlessly or running in circles irks me. I’m not a particularly goal-oriented person, but I get really fixated on at least having a destination of some sort in mind; this is essentially why I badgered our cross-country coach in high school to let us run from the school down to the local mall, rather than re-running three miles’ worth of laps for the millionth time and letting me slip into batshit fucking craziness. (Well, that and the fact that two of the other guys had a harebrained scheme to swipe some new shoes from the Foot Locker and make our speedy getaway on foot. Thankfully, the mall cops had eyes on us the second we set foot inside, so the plan went nowhere…)

Improv-based music, including most forms of jazz and noise, bugs me for the same reason. The aimlessness, the circularity, the whole idea of playing just to play — none of it works for me. I enjoy playing in a jam session with friends as much as the next half-assed quasi-trained guitarist, sure, but watching/listening to somebody else do it is about as entertaining to me as watching Sunday AM politicos blather at one another. Fun to do, sure, but not so fun to listen to.

All that said, there are ways to take the improv form and make it work, at least for me — that’s where a band like Tambersauro comes in. The trio (Mike Blackshear, Lance Higdon, and Jeff Price, plus several special guests on various tracks) takes what sounds like some seriously jam-inspired grooves and nails them viciously to the half-rotted floor of some abandoned loft with spikes crafted out of pure Chicago-style post-rock. They infuse the meandering, go-nowhere instrumental passages with math-y busy-ness, spiky guitars, and thoughtful, Slint-esque spoken/shouted vocals, and the addition gives the music purpose, seemingly hinting at a reason behind it all, however unfathomable it might be to mere mortals like you and me.

As a reference point, Slint is probably the most apt, really; like that band, Tambersauro creates obscure symphonic movements in miniature, mini-symphonies that are constantly shifting and mutating into something else, often so fast I can’t quite keep up and find myself wondering what the hell track I’m on now (answer: it doesn’t really matter, trust me). They’re murky and dark and meditative, almost hypnotic at times, with stylistic jump-cuts from post-rock angularity to atmospheric strangeness to spiraling jazz, sometimes within the span of a single song (“Take This and Leave,” “Make Water Sand,” etc.) The band grabs some Polar Goldie Cats from there, some Jonx from there, some Eno from there, some Tortoise from over there, some Fugazi from this shelf right here, and so on.

And yes, there are some truly Jonx-esque moments here (see “People Impart,” in particular); heck, the band almost comes off like the bastard child of turbulent math-rockers The Jonx and fellow Houstonians Sharks and Sailors, with the bitter energy and nimble-fingered structures of the former and the meditative-yet-still-ass-kicking feel and seriousness of the latter. (If you don’t know those bands well enough to use ’em as a reference point, well, believe me when I say you need to work on that.)

I particularly like the tone-poem-style vocals, flat and declamatory on tracks like the excellent, all-over-the-map “Make Water Sand” (which is probably the album’s centerpiece); they give the obtuse lyrics some heavy-ass weight. Hell, that part in itself can fall flat — it’d be real easy for Theories to become overindulgent and top-heavy, taking itself too seriously for its own good, and there’s really nothing worse in music than some self-important shmuck who’s convinced what they do is capital-a Art. Tambersauro dodge that trap, though, at least with me. As ultra-serious and quasi-poetic as the vocals and lyrics get, it never gets under my skin, possibly because these folks really, truly have the chops to back it up. That’s the silver bullet for self-importance: if you act like you’re making Art, you’d better actually fucking be making Art. And with Theories, Tambersauro is.

There’s never a point on Theories of Delusional Origin where I find myself thinking, “right, right, you’re a fucking poetic genius; let’s move on, alright?” There’s a passion lurking behind the flat monotone, erupting occasionally in vehement, howled fury as on album closer “Over and Down,” and it makes it feel like the band’s reserve has cracked somewhat, exposing the fire underneath. Even the improv-y stuff doesn’t rub the wrong way, here, because it feels purposeful, like it at least has a place. The skittering drums and plucked guitars that kick in about halfway through “Mitties” work where they are, because they deconstruct the tightly-wound math-rock that comes earlier on, pulling it to pieces and setting it free to roam, damaged and chaotic.

Similarly, the band slowly disassembles the drums on “Blue and White Fragments,” gently electronicizing them and stripping them down to bare metal, ’til they sound like beats straight off some mid-catalog Underworld album. In fact, if you look at Theories as a whole, assembly and disassembly might just be what it’s all about: the music evolves to its farthest point, then it falls apart, and in falling apart, it turns into something else. I can’t think of too many bands that can pull off that particular trick.