September 1 shows around Boston are tricky. Pretty much everyone spends the day one of two ways: slavishly moving from one residence to the next, or explicitly avoiding those who are. Couple that with the fact that from about Memorial Day onward, the mere notion of “Sept. 1” in Massachusetts seems as far away as Christmas, and you have a pretty weird day on the calendar.
It makes shows all the more difficult — you’re either exhausted from the move, or ready to call it a night at 7 p.m., counting your lucky stars the life-sized game of musical chairs didn’t fuck up your day entirely. By the time the last boxes have been shuffled and the music quiets down, ‘gazing dream-pop composer Tamaryn brings sweeter sounds to the heart of it all: Allston’s Great Scott.
This past Friday the New Zealand-born, and now NYC-based, Tamaryn quietly released one of the more stunning albums of 2015 in Cranekiss, a melodic display of blissful noise that has all the usual shoegaze citations — along with a sense of this is what Beach House were really striving for on Depression Cherry. Last month, Tamaryn debuted the video for the record’s title track, and the images wash away perfectly with the sounds.
“This video that I’ve made with an artist who I really respect — Bryan DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance,” Tamaryn tells Billboard. “He’s an incredible painter and he draws and he’s an amazing musician and an incredible human being. He offered to do it and he did, so I gave him full creative freedom and I just showed up in Hudson (where he lives) in a spacesuit and I just let him do his magic. I think that it’s got this alien energy to it. It’s somewhat abstract, but it suits the song very well. We didn’t shoot at the studio. We shot it outside, natural light. We didn’t really discuss it. There was no treatment. He had a picture of this pineapple in water on a mirror, and I was like, ‘I want to be that pineapple!’ And that was really all we did… It’s challenging and abstract, but then there’s times where you really see me and it’s really bare.”
It’s just enough to wash away all the madness of moving day.
