For the uninitiated Mew are a Danish alternative rock band with zillions of followers, consisting of Jonas Bjerre, Johan Wohlert and Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen and TACHYS is a side project of Jonas Bjerre and Tobias Wilner of the bands Blue Foundation, New York United, Ghost Society and Bichi, with not so much of a following. Yet. They’ve known each other for a while but this is their first joint effort as a unit.
They’ve released a couple of singles so far with positive reviews including in the UK, which is no mean feat, and now return with their third single ‘Magenta’, released on 16th December; a song about responsibility, love, and betrayal.
Whenever I see the word ‘experimentation’ in a press release I brace myself for all outcomes including that it genuinely is experimental or that it is just a jam someone knocked together at the end of a recording session and which gets released for a dare. I’ve come across both types and all shades in between.
‘Magenta’ does come under the former category. There were times I was convinced it had two overlapping time signatures. They use a lot of 1980s software on which they’ve been able to assemble that convoluted beat and the disjointed lyrics that go with it; both combining to picture the inner chaos of a troubled human mind.
Mew is an alt-rock band with prog flavouring at times but I’d struggle to apply any genre classification to TACHYS if this track is anything to go by. Chillwave at a pinch but more melodic and even verging on psych. The vocals are as mucilaginous as you might expect to find on some or other mumble rap effort being played out of a beat box in Compton or other equally salubrious hood. One on its own for sure.
The video is interesting. It has TACHYS walking through their own local neighbourhood, after a brief cameo from Mothman. Filmed as it is as a negative, I thought we might be in Compton but it appears it is Nørrebro in Copenhagen. Nørrebro is an interesting place, I wrote about it another review recently, it seems it is Copenhagen’s most trendy, inner city suburb, where le tout Danish avant-garde music scene lives or hangs out.
Not that you’d know from the video. They’re in a skateboard park in Anytown. But it is arty, no question.
There’s enough here to tell me TACHYS are worth bookmarking for the future, partly for their experimentation and mainly because you can’t be sure just what they’ll come up with next.
Find them on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tachys-110488233945114
