Album Review

Tearwave – Different Shade of Beauty

• 4th Aug 2008

Tearwave have managed to create a mammoth of an album here. 17 well produced songs of easy darkwave listening. Remember when bands like the Cure used to produce albums with this many tracks and you couldn’t comprehend just how god most of the songs were? That was of course 20 years ago. Tearwave are continuing that trend of quality and quantity. A feat that can embarrass those who are just not capable of producing this type of material in such measures.

Things start off slow and grand with ‘Shattered Fairytale’ which is like a Tearwave introduction. Spiraling guitars and drums with Jennifer Manganeillo’s voice echoing all over the place. This leads into the thunder and rain (ok maybe a cliché) of ‘Holding On’ and you realise that this album is going to be a journey. Again it isn’t often that an album comes along that makes you block off the outisde world so you can relish every moment of it. Anticipation building as the album makes its journey.

Tearwave come under the ever growing Projekt record label based in the states who are devoted to publishing music from the gothic and especially darkwave music field. Tearwave along with Autumn’s Grey Solace are certainly one of the more traditionally pretty bands to listen to. But there is deep thought and intensity that has been put into this work.

The afore mentioned ‘Shattered Fairytale’ is certainley a starting stand out, but such treats as a more pop friendly ‘Nothing’s Wrong’ and the total shoegazing fit of ‘Under the Milky Way’ which recalls lost bands such as Lush (a band commonly linked with Tearwave, but you see why when listening). Here they are at their most dreamy, but they are at their most alluring and darkly with the hypnoticly spiralling ‘Love Only Makes Me Weak.’

It seems that after an impressionable first album the only way to tale a second was to go all out and write the heck out of this one. Efforts that have ultimately paid off – but you hope they don’t go burning out too fast and can endure producing such material whilst keeping themselves fresh.

Tearwave have taken a very versatile genre of music that seemed to fade and fizzle in the late 90’s and are pumping some life back into it. The trouble with music such as this is its unpredicatble nature. Most bands that were good at it disappeared without even the opportunity to become mediocre repeats of themselves. Other genres of music have since moved into the spotlight and we havent heard enough of it since to allow it back. Thankfully in recent years bands such as My Bloody Valentine have reforemd, and diverse acts like The Dandy Warhols are broad enough to create a thirst for people to want to find more experimental indie music as opposed to the modern rock of today. Tearwave are without doubt a band who are top of things again. With this second release in as many years they have produced a very impressive body of work here that is ready to join their peers as one band that knew how to create sound and feeling within an attractive work of art.