Exposure - Tango in the Attic
Despite the apparently never-ending harsh times worldwide, Tango In The Attic actually sound like they’re having a lot of fun. Bright, colourful, and straight to the point, their songs have a charm to them that could very easily be overlooked and overblown by careless labeling, like ‘summer sensation’ – which looks all the more likely given the recent though rather accurate comparisons to bands like Vampire Weekend - or other wretched pedestals. However, those who instead take these songs for what they are – instant hits of spiky melodic energy - may be pleasantly surprised by their accessibility and youthful exuberance.
Having made the shortlist for this year’s T-break competition, the five-piece from Glenrothes are set to play next month’s T In The Park, and are gearing up for a split release with fellow finalists Be A Familiar. To get you started though, here’s the band’s guitarist Jordan Craig with a few words.
How did you meet and form the band?
Most of us grew up together and we met James our bass player at Uni. We’d all played in various bands before but were desperate to start something we could take seriously, but have a lot of fun with at the same time. This probably stemmed from our dislike of the academic lifestyle.
Is there any significant reason behind the name?
It came from an old Beatles flyer in the studio we recorded our first material in. It was based on some kind of circus thing, I’m not sure if the word Tango was even on it – but it evolved to that anyway. We had something like ‘Tango in the Circus’ then Daniel looked up, saw the studio attic and - hey presto. It carries a fair whack of significance because that recording session is where we really found our sound and decided a lot about how we would present ourselves to people. It’s the session we recorded ‘Jackanory’ in. The name is inextricably tied to that session.
Do you all have similar tastes? What would consider to be your biggest musical influences or inspirations?
We all like a lot of the same music, but we also all have extremely differing tastes. For instance I’m mad keen on The Walkmen, James is Paul Simon out his nut, Joe who plays organ is into folky music, Paul learned to play drums from punk records and Daniel our vocalist is into a random bunch of stuff from Ryan Adams to Death Cab For Cutie. We all have pretty wide-spread tastes though, liking things from Radiohead to The Strokes to electronica to jazz. When we’re writing music we all push to get our different tastes into the song, which can make writing a song very difficult sometimes!
In general we try to keep things quite upbeat and straightforward – we’ll leave the crazy stuff for the fourth album.
Where's your favourite place to play?
Bathgate. They’ve got an amazing group of music-lovers over there who like to go nuts at a show and who travel everywhere to support bands. The gigs are always mental and really fun to play. Gotta love playing at home too at The Greenside. Love the sound of that place and had many a classic night there.
If you could, how would you describe your music?
Well, we describe our sound as east-coast lo-fi garage… what that means is we’re strongly influenced by ‘east-coast’ bands like The Velvet Underground, The Strokes, The Walkmen etc hence we tie this into our residence on the east coast of Scotland – where there is actually a distinction from, say, the west coast. The sound of bands from over here tends to be a little grittier.
I’d say our sound is fairly Lo-Fi, when we’re recording we don’t wanna go for this clean, polished sound. We like to keep it fairly raw and live-sounding. And yeah I’d go with garage, in keeping with some of our most influential bands growing up such as The Vines, The Stokes, The White Stripes. They were all part of the garage revival.
Do you have plans for any releases in the pipeline?
We’re releasing ‘Blunderground’ on July 20th. It’s a split single with our friends Be A Familiar who are releasing a track called ‘You’d Make A Great Ghost’. We’ll be playing live on Vic Galloway’s Radio One show to promote it.
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
We’re playing T In The Park and hoping to get more festivals confirmed. Plenty of gigs all summer with the Blunderground single release in July. We’re looking to get an EP recorded for towards the end of the summer with four or five tracks. From there we’ll look to get some high-profile support slots while trying to attract industry attention. We’ve already had quite a few enquiries from a few small record labels, management companies, promo companies etc but for now we’ve been happy doing things ourselves. I suppose we’ll just keep on trying to climb the ladder and won’t stop ‘til we’re recording an album in the south of France, with everyone running around after us while we hit a round of 18 to unwind.