The Tunnel Shudder (Color) vinyl is the San Francisco band’s seventh full-length, and it earns its comparisons to The Birthday Party and Big Black by building something genuinely its own out of macabre noir and mechanized noise rather than simply imitating the reference points.
What The Tunnel Shudder (Color) Vinyl Actually Sounds Like
Shudder opens with stabs of growling bass, a discordant guitar peal, and the robotic thump of a floor tom before Jeff Wagner’s voice enters. Wagner sings with a sinister croon caked in distortion and sleaze, a delivery that critics have drawn to Nick Cave’s range of darkness without making it sound derivative. The Big Black comparison brings in the cold machinery side of the record. These two energies, sultry noir and industrial throb, press against each other throughout all ten tracks. White Light/White Heat described it as a mix of “seedy primeval swampy muddy groove” and “industrialized noise racket,” dropping names from The Birthday Party to Big Black. The band recorded, mixed, and mastered Shudder themselves, which means every decision in the record reflects exactly what Jeff Wagner, bassist Sam Black, and drummer Michael Jacobs intended without outside intervention softening the vision. The record moves through its ten tracks from “Deathray” and “Frontage” to “Zealot” and “Uneasy,” each one sinking and slithering between shotgun shack territory and dark alley territory, evoking a fantasy where backwoods gloom meets dystopian urban decay. San Francisco fed the other half of the inspiration alongside the source material in the songs and films of those reference artists.
The Color Vinyl Edition
Learning Curve released Shudder on color vinyl, and the pressing gives the record the physical presentation its ambition deserves. Ten tracks, fully self-produced, operating in a sonic space that doesn’t have many direct neighbors in contemporary heavy music. The Birthday Party and Big Black references are not decorative: if those are records you return to regularly, The Tunnel’s seventh full-length belongs in the same rotation. Goth, post-punk, no wave, and dark Americana all feed into what Shudder is, but the result sounds distinctly like The Tunnel and nothing else.
Tracklist
1. DEATHRAY 2. FRONTAGE 3. SHUDDER 4. TUNGSTEN 5. HANGMAN 6. SUBDUCTRESS 7. RACKNID 8. DAYBREAK 9. ZEALOT 10. UNEASY
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