Padang Food Tigers
Constantly bubbling below the surface, London duo Padang Food Tigers have long held down a meditative corner of the mind over their four albums and various tributary collaborations. As they waft into a fifth album, just a few months after their collaboration with Andrew Tuttle, the band is as potent and patient as ever. Occupying a space between the seams of folk, field recordings, ambient, and country (of the Bruce Langhorne variety), the band’s sounds wash over the body like a lost wavelength. God’s Plenty arrives on warm breezes, radiating from all directions with feelings of familiarity that are hard to place, but comforting nonetheless. Voices, when they appear give a sense of bustling humanity, but they are always secondary to the vibrating calm at the band’s core. String, strum, thrum, or voice all become a tapestry of late afternoon iridescent ache.
The album rolls like landscape, but I’m always a bit more partial to the parts where the band hew close to the barn, creating an ambient folk country that aligns them with SUSS, Barry Walker, or North Americans. Like those artists the band’s patience is perhaps their best strength, never pushing skill over temperament. While the duo can certainly ripple the strings with the best of them, they work in a more painterly fashion to create those aforementioned landscapes, never wasting a brush stroke, a drone, or a vibration of strings. I know that everyone seems to be wrapping on 2021, but save some space for this on your listening list, especially as the skies begin to scar with clouds and cold. You’re gonna need this for warmth.
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