Album review: Enablers – Tundra

One thing can be said about Tundra without me even having to listen to it – it’s going to be a collector’s item. Quite how the fame of Enablers grows over the next few years will determine whether it’s the sort of item you’ll buy for the niche kudos or as an investment for your kids. Then again, given the way physical media is suffering in music distribution right now, it might be both…

But I digress – Tundra will be a collector’s item because there will only be 1,300 copies made, and they’re going to come in a wooden box with some other gubbins. Ah, music as artefact! That’s the way forward for the niche artist in the modern age! And believe me, Enablers are pretty damned niche.

But what do they do? Well, it’s post-rock meets spoken word, basically, but that’s a massive oversimplification. The press release defies me to compare them to any other band, and that’s a challenge I can take on confidently – Enablers are like Slint. But only in the sense that Tundra shows a band thinking in similar ways and taking similar approaches to Slint, rather than striving to sound exactly like them.

For there are differences, you see. The musical approach may be similar – queasy discordant riffs and arpeggios on clean and brittle electric guitars, weird rhythmic shifts and changes – but Enablers have a different tone and texture. Where Spiderland had a kind of suburban claustrophobia, Tundra has a sense of the great outdoors, of wild empty spaces, a self-imposed isolation from otherness, maybe. It’s the sound of drinking bad whisky in the deep wilderness; melancholic, temperamental, prone to unexpected fits of rage that end as abruptly as they begin. Abrupt hairpin changes drive in from out of nowhere; endings come up fast like a fog-covered ravine in the headlights.

Pete Simonelli’s vocals are a big part of the Enablers vibe, though by no means its only appeal. Tundra is punctuated by his measured and sonorous speech, from the almost gentle David Lynch-esque muttering of “Februaries” to “Tundra” itself, which ends as a stentorian brimstone rant from some white-bearded and well-spoken Southern preacher; you can almost see the fist-shaking and furrowed brow, the slight angle at which it’s operating in relation to reality. Not mad as such, just… focussed. Well, maybe mad as well. Who am I to judge, eh? It’s a voice you pay attention to, that’s for certain, even as it paints fragmentary snapshots of the world beyond the windowpane.

In case it isn’t obvious, I think Tundra is an excellent album, and I get something new from it with every listen – always part of the appeal of spoken word projects set to music, in my experience. The whole album burgeons with brooding menace and momentary detail, both at the level of the music and the vocals; it’s full of life, in other words, though the life in question is sullen and stifled by growing up in a small town it doesn’t like. Despite being surprisingly short (ten tracks in just over half an hour), Tundra packs a mean punch like a riled wino. Grab yourself a slice of the Enablers story before the chance disappears.