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At once both retrospective and devilishly futuristic at the same time, creative duality hits us like a ton of bricks in the opening cut and title track of The Transonics’ new EP Tides, but as we listen on, its split personality becomes a point of cohesion no one in the audience will be able to ignore. What The Transonics are trying to pull off in this record is so much bigger than what you’d normally expect out of an extended play running just under thirty minutes in total length, but all things considered, their atmospheric melodicism and sharp lyricism couldn’t have found a better venue through which to shine. With nothing in this tracklist but single-quality diamonds, there’s no mining for personality nor musical wisdom in this fine new record.
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/thetransonics/
“When You Were Mine” keeps the hard throttle indie rock going at a more casual, almost neo-balladic tempo, but this isn’t to say that The Transonics start sacrificing moxie for melodic fireworks here at all. “Tequila” probably has the most experimental profile of any song on the EP, though I wouldn’t say that it dwarfs the ambitiousness of the material it sits beside at all. Instead, I think it does a lot to support the centerpiece of Tides from a poetic perspective; after all, its instrumentation bids hello to a more adventurous angle of their sound we might not have noticed beforehand whilst the lyrics touch on the consistencies between this release and their rookie LP that arrived some two years ago now.
My two favorite tracks from Tides are probably the conflictive “Orange Sunshine” and “Getcha,” but not because of what they’re about or even the way they’re made up to sound as colorful as they would on stage somewhere. To me, they represent the two bands The Transonics have been since their formation – a spunky punky indie rock crew and a careful, deliberate postmodern pop outfit that has everything from conceptualism to tonal communication on their mind in the studio, and when they’re brought together inside of the same extended play as they have been here, the results are brilliant to say the least. I find myself coming back to the word ‘immersive’ whenever I listen to this record, and it’s not because of the high definition production quality alone – it’s the skill these musicians are affording every note they play.
APPLE MUSIC: https://music.apple.com/us/album/tides/1572078955?i=1572078958
We wrap up Tides with the softer, slinky “Midnight,” but even in this quiet burst of energy, catharsis is never very hard to find. The Transonics have been flying under the mainstream radar for a while now, but in this EP we start to see some of their most breathtaking elements surfacing with a distinctly potent sonic hue, and it’s something I could get used to as both a music critic and a genuine fan. Tides has all the cornerstone moments I would demand from a studio album, but neatly packaged inside of a record that could segue between LPs as much as it could potentially soundtrack the most memorable section of a summer road trip.
by Jennifer Munoz
