Tonne
Subtract & Slide
(Self-Released, 2014)
B+
Tonne’s blink-and-miss-it release of its debut EP, Subtract & Slide, this past October is a shame. Not that you can’t discover the Oklahoma City duo now (as I just happily did), but because it’s an autumn album to its core, music designed for when the sun is brushed to the periphery by brisk winds. That’s not to be mistaken for cold, as there’s warmth to be harvested at the center of each of the album’s six offerings. The air has bite, but where many see a depleted landscape in transition, Tonne finds opportunity in the leaves of change.
Built by Connor Schmigle and Taylor Hale, Subtract & Slide is as much an approach to the material as a descriptor for it. There’s mirror shards and smudged finger prints of ’80s new wave, MBV-guitar coasting, post-punk, and even faint traces atmospheric arena rock. It’s as brawny as it is brainy, pivoting just left-of-center with its big, cloudy scores, and the end product is chiseled down into something resembling The National playing a basement set. That sensation springs from Hale equalling the burly baritone bellow of Matt Beringer (it’s uncanny, really), but the excisions from that path distance themselves from the Ohio rockers.
Enough, at least; the storm cloud is still planted right overhead — like Saturday morning cartoon sadness — through the duration of this moody narrative. But it’s not water raining down; it’s something denser and more viscous than that. The compositions have tar in their veins and stuck to their feet, and that’s where Tonne finds a mode to thrive in. That lumbering pace isn’t tedious, instead serving as the framework for experiments in disparity, letting the lighter elements get their true due. Case in point: “Newport” is a heavy, removed march until keyboard flares bring an amber glow to the thicket of fog it sits in, only to be smothered again. It’s math — addition and subtraction games aimed to find the true value of each.
Smoked to the point of falling apart, “Mathlete” and “Nevada” are blackened surfaces whose tender grains crumble away with a press of your hand. The former seethes the affair to a start in a churn of charred fuzz and cracked warbles, opening into a heart-clutching shoegaze jam that can’t decide whether to embrace you or turn you away. “Nevada” is the answer, fermenting a formidable indie-rock jam right out of that pin-poked darkness, lulling you in with gliding percussion and a knobby groove of a bridge — one of a few refreshing respites in this willfully monotone outing.
It’s tonally incessant and insistent, an album very comfortable with the constraints it works within and not out of. It isn’t flat, though; it would have been if executed any less capably, but it’s expertly assembled. That’s never more apparent than it is on “Quail,” working its way deeper inside you with every passing “remember” Hale offers up against that cavernous backdrop. Closer “Animal” dawns a new day, a lively aggregation of the washes and finishes sprinkled throughout, one that plays more like new growth than the shedding of old. It’s a fitting end for an album that was building toward that all along, whether it planned to or not.
