URL: www.streakingintongues.com/
I don’t care how long you’ve been making music or how popular your marketing approach might be. You could be a master poet with a dozen or more publications under your belt and a knack for rhymes that would make even the most gifted linguist do a double-take; your lyrics are absolutely worth nothing if you don’t have good music to back them up. The pop music establishment seems to have forgotten this, and Streaking in Tongues have arrived to give them a little refreshment. Their new record Kindergarten Prayers doesn’t rely on delicately woven lyrics alone to touch our souls; in fact, their lyrics make up a mere fraction of their identity.
Streaking in Tongues puts a lot of value on making music that isn’t one dimensional, and even if you’re not familiar with their sound right now, Kindergarten Prayers is sprawling enough to leave an impression on even the snobbiest of music enthusiasts. Their efforts especially weren’t in vein with this record, which is stacked high with 22 different songs working together to bring the band out of the studio and into your living room through a pair of speakers and a hard working turntable. This is their best work yet, and after hearing their first incredible two albums I didn’t think I’d be able to say that.
I would love to hear these guys do a straight noise record, but it would need to be rooted in the ambience that Kindergarten Prayers highlights for us so immaculately. The tones of this album are never overstated, and while it might be a little frustrating for discriminating noise aficionados to separate the atonal from the harmonious moments of tempered melody, I see it as the most progressively minded ambient music I’ve heard in at least 15 years if not longer. Say what you will about their DIY production, but this is as virtuous as avant-garde pop gets without being totally foreign to mainstream ears.
Whether it’s making original music videos, experimenting with multimedia and modern performance techniques or just making records like Kindergarten Prayers, Streaking in Tongues has got their hands in almost every portion of the art world right now, and their ambitious reach is getting impossible to ignore. When artists make a play for exposure starting from the ground and moving up (as opposed to buying their way in via another means of recognition), their music has time to cultivate and really grow into its own. This band is doing everything the right way and they aren’t even having to suffer for it. Anyone else sense a living legend in our presence?
If I ever have the chance to see Streaking in Tongues perform in a live setting, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Bands like this one only come around every great once in a while, and more frequently than we like to acknowledge, they don’t get the attention that they deserve until they’ve stopped recording and playing all together. I wouldn’t dream of missing the opportunity to see history before my very eyes, and I think that anyone else who has listened to Kindergarten Prayers knows exactly what I mean.
SPOTIFY: open.spotify.com/artist/1yMeAzPQ6ku0XOH4o6ZBM8
Clay Burton