Tara Jane O’Neil’s music is integrated and contextual, idiosyncratic and deeply psychedelic, akin to a lucid dream journal caught on magnetic tape. She appears to be interested in all sounds equally. In her tireless search for a music that mirrors and reflects her alchemical, deeply syncretic approach to sound, color, language, surface and texture, she has found herself in a somewhat singular category.
Her concerns are free from fussing about form. Her albums posit some free space that owes more to improvisors and painters than singer-songwriters or new age synthesiser baths. She is still interested in songs, and she has always been a wordsmith, but her songs don’t need to have words to signify. When words are utilised, she doesn’t waste them. They are beautifully mystical outbursts of visionary poesis, but their narrative power is located within and informed by, the space, the harmonic colour, the context in which they are sung.
TJO has always been a shapeshifter. Listen to this new album with open ears, forgetting any previous incarnation, or perception of what you believe this mercurial artist to be or to have been. Using some very basic recording equipment and her vivid musical imagination, she has achieved a rare essentialism wherein all unnecessary elements have been stripped away leaving only the most indispensable sounds. Concise, but expansive, stripped of unnecessary gestures; guitars resonate, amps hum, and an exquisite, languid melancholia appears out of the haze.
“There’s a characteristic tone that runs through all of her albums– an elastic guitar reverb that stretches to give a delicate puff to her songs, drums that rarely go beyond a gentle grounding pitter-patter and, of course, the haunting lull of her voice, which beckons the listener into her world with mellow grace.” – Pitchfork
“Tara Jane O’Neil is a one-woman creative tornado.” – Emusic
“O’Neil is playing to the mists of rain floating from the earth as we might hope our souls would one day.” – Tiny Mix Tapes
No Comments