Storied SF indie titans Tartufi give an exclusive, advanced listen to These Factory Days dropping tomorrow, March 26 from Southern Records. With the group's decade plus chrysalises of audio evolutions, Factory Days finds Lynne Angel and Brian Gorman welcoming Low Red Land and Minot's Ben Thorne on bass, with the blessings from Louder Studios' Tim Green and Hyde Street Studios' Scott McDowell. Try as we might to encapsulate and repeat to you in pithy terms what the SF trio accomplishes on their tenth-plus release, the devoted and work driven These Factory Days is the pastoral gift of progressive dreams from the heart and minds of the proletariat where the song titles exist only as flag markers to indicate points of position within a larger body of back breaking work.
Opening number “Underwater” beckons and summons you to “slip away” with Lynne, Ben and Brian, as the three make music for the surrounding elements with music and vocals that command the ebb and flow of sea and tide. And just as you wrap your head around the first 2 minutes, Tartufi shakes things up with a vocal-building block exercise where the guitars burst into the forefront before returning to the rhythmic and patient lull of the next portion of the song suite. “Underwater” continues its undersea exploration of the sonic variety that could never be captured from a rough weekend recording session.
“Seldom” presents the calculated mathematics that can be credited to the rhythm glue of Thorne's bass line scaled inclusions. From this percussive spin, the science goes from the musical theorem schools to the tribal, all the while Lynne and Ben's trip is laid on thick, in ways unexpected, in waves of motions and movements and Biblical “spill your seeds in spoils” commands.
The water channel whirler “Eaves” continues to grow into enchanted forms on every listen. With melodies like the the descriptions of leaves gliding in the runoff stream runways, “through these eaves you float like leaves in this rain”. Dabbling in everything from the sound of crashing a '90s Renaissance-Faire to prog freakouts; the primal rebel howls are grounded in the band's smartness where every sound and utterance is all played and sung in appropriated part and time obsessed turn.
“Glass Eyes” is the lull that is clever enough to deceive the listener as a break, until you notice the instrumentation build rising higher than the combined height of San Francisco's live and work condo/lofts. Guiding their footwork and paths are the new written proverbs that present the arboreus cycles of family feuds and nature's seasons. “Trees shall be turned into shadows, their fruit into dust…families kept thoughts to themselves as they stumble alone, and feel nothing more exhilarating than saving yourself from your soul”.
“Furnace Of Fortune” brings out the big musical guns, as the three strong arm their way through darkness like the flight of sparrows. Tartufi traverses the multi-faceted musical goldmine of “Fortune” where the chorus grows from the song's breakdown that bridges into a variety of xylophone dotted sections, and trad segments that sway like the foliage whistles of leaves in the Northern California breeze.
The CD and LP only cut “Edgar Lovelace” presents a ghostly hyper jazz rhythm clencher that ends in an electric crashing finale. Which brings us to the closing “8:1”, a gnostic Latin incantation of new ratios and newer testaments. Smokes of distortion are swung like metal thurible censers amid chants, before the final minute puts everything on the line, holds nothing back and takes it to the metallic limit one more time.
Tartufi's new album These Factory Days will be available March 26 from Southern Records.
