Their moody pop is starting to reverberate with critics
Rarely has there been a truer album title than "I Was Submerged," the latest EP by Tulsa, a Boston outfit whose songs sound like disquieting dreams released into an echo chamber. The music is both haunted and haunting, a nocturnal fever dream of melodies that float through the dark - gorgeously hushed one moment, splendidly roaring the next. Quite literally, Tulsa singer-songwriter Carter Tanton submerges himself in a sea of reverberating vocals, pulling the listener in with him.
"You're on the floor of the ocean now," Tanton sings, his voice edged with panic amid an undertow of distortion-drenched guitars and rolling, roiling drums. "Digging deeper to find a sand vault to swallow the rotten parts of your mind." Four minutes later the song, titled "#2," ends in a howling tunnel of noise, unresolved but strangely lovely and enthralling nonetheless.
"I've always had people tell me, 'Oh, no, you can't use that much reverb,' " says Tanton, explaining the striking signature of his band, which plays Great Scott tonight. "I would ask for more, and the amount people would give me would be like, I couldn't even hear it. But sometimes, I've written songs with reverb on the voice because it's so inspiring."
The liberal use of that effect strongly echoes (pun intended) similarly reverb-obsessed groups such as My Morning Jacket. "I don't know any of their specific songs, actually," says Tanton, 27. "The impression they've left me with is strictly a sonic one. I can't hum any of the lyrics and don't have any of their CDs. But when I hear them, I've definitely been moved."
So too have critics, who are fast taking notice of Tulsa, which Tanton formed two years ago with drummer Greg Hatem, bassist Eric Wormwood, and guitarist-keyboardist Marc Pinansky (who has since left the band to devote more time to another local band, the '70s-style rock outfit Township, for whom Tanton also once played). Since its release last month, "I Was Submerged" - the band's first nondigital-only release - has garnered accolades from almost everywhere: Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, and just about anyone else who hears it. Not too shabby for a band whose singer moved from Baltimore to Boston on a whim.
The move east, he says, turned out to be the right one: "In Baltimore, I was always trying to find the right drummer." He didn't have to look too far. Hatem is also originally from Baltimore but played with bands Tanton describes as less pop-oriented than Tulsa and more loosely open-ended. In fact, that alchemy - moody atmosphere and classic pop structure - is precisely what makes Tulsa such a striking proposition.
"I think some people are surprised that we can be ambient and space-y, but we can also come out with a three-minute song that's really strong - I think those elements draw people in," says Tanton. "You can't write it off as shoegaze music, and you can't write it off as just pop music."
Thanks to a baby sitter in Baltimore, Tanton grew up surrounded by pop and rock music. First, it was Elvis Presley he heard around the house. Then it was Michael Jackson. "Then I got a guitar because I saw Nirvana on TV break their guitars and goof around, and it looked really fun," says Tanton, whose early infatuation with the Seattle grunge icons can be heard on the EP's saturnine final track, "There Goes a Man."
"I was kind of a private kid who liked to hang out by myself a lot, so I played a lot of guitar and wrote songs right from the start," he adds. "I didn't really ever learn people's songs because that was too hard. I just made up my own. I thought, 'I want to be known as somebody who writes songs,' because I think that's a really beautiful thing you can do with your life." 