Review: Lend Me Your Underbelly - Giant Tadpoles Among Us

The elements force the melodies here into crooked growth. Each track on Giant Tadpoles Among Us carries a sort of phototropic slant; set on a giddy diagonal by the field recording confetti (cascades of sucked in words crafted from reversed conversation, wooden scrapes and impact tacked together into an organic typewriter mechanism) that swirls around and blots out large chunks of stereo space, leaving the guitars and voices to rise and swerve toward the sun along jaunty (but unavoidable) routes. The arrangements are pliable, comprised of a compositional bamboo that arches and diverges without snapping the pieces into dissociative ambient fragments, and even with the other rhythms and tonal activity that crumples against the bowed and bent totem core, I see each of this nine tracks as songs; boxed up constructions of beat and melody into which I read a loose, yet undoubtedly coherent, desire to communicate.

There’s something autumnal about it – the commencement of transient disconnection and loose debris tumbling down from the trees. The linear is dislodged ever so slightly, and there is a commotion in the album’s offsetting of place and chronology – sounds of the playground are blown forcefully into isolated patches of woodland and left to babble and loop, while house keys sway and jangle into guitars caught in a quivering, hyperventilated strum, forming mutually operative rhythms that slide gently out of parallel. I feel threatened by the way in which synchronicity peels apart – distrusting of the floor that cracks and shifts beneath me, clinging on helpless to the song that tries to assert itself: the one gravitated singularity in amongst the sound that jostles and wavers like tethered balloons.