Vision Tunnels - Brothertiger - CD (2010)

Labels: Inverted Audio
Review by: Andy Malcolm

This summer I have been listening to a bunch of stuff I wouldn’t normally dally with, just wandering aimlessly around a few musical alleyways and cul de sacs, downloading stuff off blogs that sounds like it might be even a little bit interesting, having trysts with random songs that I know little about, and don’t really have a desire to know any more, just that at that particular moment in time, the song fitted. I mean, one song that has cropped up now and again in my ears is this frankly dubious track that sounds like the Pet Shop Boys playing 80s fantasy movie music. Quite. Yet I think I like it. Anyway.

Not much of that has a great deal to do with Vision Tunnels except to say they sound a lot like quite a bit of the music I’ve contrived to push through my ears. I suspect that post September and every day is 9 degrees, any of this stuff will be skipped in a heartbeat, but for now, it is rather pleasing. Vision Tunnels here stumble through 4 songs of repetitious synth-pop, and if you have even a ninth of an ear to the ground regarding this kind of music, you’ll know that means an abundance of 80s feel and blissed out vocals, draped over layers of warm synth. Basically music that sounds like the gentle encroachment of the tide. All of these songs are at least 4 minutes long, and opener “Summer House” is the absolute pick of the bunch, a total woolly headed comforter of a track. The other 3 songs flirt with the same ideas, blurring them together in different ways, and as there are only 4 in total, it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.



Currently about 1 in 3 people play this music, and the other 2 people listen to the 1. It doesn’t sound a million miles away from any other band religiously creating this sound by the book, and it’s not as good as Washed Out, but it’s terribly endearing and pleasant and maybe it’s just because I am of a certain age and it carts me back to a time when I could get away with not needing to give a shit about anything whatsoever. The memories are long since over-written, but the notion is there.