Send "Other Lives " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Oklahoma’s Other Lives released their self-titled debut album in 2009, following the breakup of frontman Jesse Tabish’s previous band, Kunek. Other Lives’s latest offering, Tamer Animals, sees the quintet reaching for a fuller, epic sound full of sweeping cello and violin lines rounding out the guitars, drums, and keys. It’s all rather hushed and downtempo, but with a wide-open-spaces feel to it, Tamer Animals isn’t exactly mopey music. It is introspective, though, and well suited to staring out the window on long rainy afternoons.Opener “Dark Horse” introduces elements that will be used throughout the album, namely a languid tempo, layers of sound including trumpet, strings and percussion, and Tabish’s moaning mournful vocals, which are quick to glide into falsetto. Subsequent tracks vary the proportion, with “As I Lay My Head Down” offering a quicker tempo to go with its Thom Yorke-esque vocals, and “For 12” building swirling towers of synth confection atop a bed of brisk acoustic guitar. Looking for a sax solo or bit of guitar wankery? You’re out of luck. These songs all give the feeling of being carefully constucted, layer upon layer. The good news is this results in a feeling or organic wholeness, but the bad news is that nothing in particular stands out — not a song, not a lyric, not an instrumental break. The record possesses an extraordinary evenness. The record’s publicity material makes much of this, positioning Tamer Animals as a “proper long player” that one should listen to from beginning to end. What I remember about those old LPs, though, is that the expectation that they would be listened to did not equal the expectation that all the songs should follow the same pattern. With a few exceptions — I’m looking at you, Pink Floyd — most bands that released LPs took some pains to include variation in song structure or tonal palette, if nothing else....full text |
| Consequenceofsound |
| It’s hard to keep things fresh considering the impossibility of creating something entirely new to the music world anymore. If being completely original is not an option, what is one do to? Well, if you’re Other Lives, you take a long gestation period to carefully craft your music to make sure it sounds exactly how you’d like to present it. Over the course of 14 months, Other Lives meticulously wrote, recorded, and self-produced their newest album, Tamer Animals, at their quaint studio in the small town of Stillwater, Oklahoma. The instrumentation on the album is abundant: bassoon, bass clarinet, violin, trumpet, French horn, and cello, all working together to add another voice to the band entirely. The outcome of which is a sweeping wave of sounds that will crash over and swallow you whole. “As I Lay My Head Down” begins with thundering drums beating along to the clang of the tambourine and the soothing voice of member Jenny Hsu, but not without said violins, castanets, and bass clarinet giving the song a deep, emotional intensity. It’s clear from the beginning that the music has a cinematic quality to it — painting various images in your head, as if you’re dreaming while awake....full text |
| Bbc |
| There’s no track this writer’s thrashed more this year than Other Lives’ single For 12. It’s suspenseful, dreamy and awestruck in equal measures, combining undulating strings (possibly Mellotron), lightly galloping Morricone rhythms, subtle shades of piano and acoustic guitar and vocals that run the gauntlet from sighing to falsetto. Imagine an eagle’s eye view over an unbroken stretch of Brokeback Mountain prairie. Or imagine Fleet Foxes influenced by Radiohead’s Pyramid Song. And if For 12 is the absolute jewel here, the rest isn’t far behind. Tamer Animals is the Oklahoma quintet’s second album, following 2009’s eponymous album and, back in 2006, the debut under former alias Kunek. Neither matches this watermark of quiet grandeur or strikes the same balance between lavishness and restraint. If band lynchpin Jesse Tabish’s choruses don’t instantly lasso like, say, Adele or a Simon Cowell prodigy, his tunes appear to swoon through the air and might haunt your deep sleep. File under Pastoral Americana alongside Fleet Foxes and Midlake (you could bet your house on at least three members sporting beards), but there is a major difference: Tabish worships instrumental music, and classical minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass, which accounts for the album’s pulsating orchestrations. Piano, bassoon, bass clarinet, violin, trumpet, French horn, cello – in Tabishworld, instruments harmonise as much as, if not more than, voices. If his restrained, wistful, almost shy vocal is double-tracked for bonus comfort, it’s an unbroken stretch of land away from Crosby, Stills & Nash and any notion of 70s retro. Even more than Tabish’s influences, there’s liable to be something in Oklahoma’s water, or those huge skies, that gives Other Lives their panoramic aura. Perhaps Tabish is the modern equivalent of the ‘singing cowboy’, roaming that prairie and drinking up the Mexican and Anglo-Saxon influences from America’s south-west (though strictly speaking, Oklahoma is north of Texas and geographically central-southern) which moulded the ‘Western’ half of C&W....full text |
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