Artwork for Tennis’ 2023 album Pollen
Love is in the air on Tennis’ new album.
Husband and wife duo Tennis – singer Alaina Moore and instrumentalist Patrick Riley – occupy an odd career space artists with longevity can quite often reach by accident.
After they initially met and formed a band in Colorado at the back end of the noughties, Pollen is now their sixth album and the strength of its predecessor Swimmer helped them sell out prestigious gigs on America’s east and west coasts.
More analytically (and although these things can lie) the duo’s streaming numbers platform are also better than most.
All this suggests that they’re stuck in the zone between big underground and small overground status, a location which Pollen won’t necessarily free them from.
It was preceded by the single Let’s Make A Mistake Tonight, the kind of buffed-to-a-shine indie they’ve long been unashamedly happy to keep alive, and a song Moore has described vividly in concept with: ‘I’m in the passenger’s seat. Patrick drives with one hand on the wheel and one on my thigh. This song plays us out.’
As an idea though it certainly brings into stark relief the complications of writing a love song which wasn’t about your significant other when you’re on stage with them fifty nights a year, but after a decade plus you don’t, let’s face it, listen to Tennis albums for too much domestic un-bliss.
Tennis’ loved up vibe even extends to the biographical One Night With The Valet, less than two minutes of how-it-started magic that pretty much bullseyes an appeal located in the middle of a Venn diagram between blue-eyed disco, grown up pop and yacht rock.
Yachts in fact have plenty to do with their DNA; post college the pair decided to become Tennis after an eight-month sailing trip down the eastern seaboard, and Pollen was ideated during a further lengthy jaunt around the Sea of Cortez.
And for long spells that sense of freedom, light and space is what dominates the mood, with opener Forbidden Doors, the pitter-pattering Gibraltar and Hotel Valet’s silver service sex jam (wait, are we back there again?) all variations on a mellifluous theme.
There are deviations, but odd ones: Pollen Song is a slice of reedy MOR on which the enemy at first appears to be hay fever until a mid-track pirouette and maybe some antihistamines kick in and everything becomes another moonlit cruise down another coastal highway.
And if you thought that was weird, the strum of Glorietta sounds a bit like Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac but the gnostic phrases it contains refer to chemtrails, ‘patriotic displays’ and a ‘biblical mandate’.
There may be underlying themes here which could keep a therapist busy no matter how many kisses are on Moore and Riley’s texts to each other, however it’s never clear whether or how listeners are meant to engage with them.
This ambiguity extends to Never Been Wrong, a bone fide 90’s alt-rocker on which the singer’s voice carries a real gravity whilst at the same time using Latin to make up the song’s bridge, an act like an attempt to hide live feelings inside the construct of a dead language.
Tennis recently have spoken about a desire to write songs that leave themselves more open, maybe with the intent of finding a higher level of understanding for their music, but if this is truly the case Pollen is still too much of what made them what they are, avatars that have outgrown their invisible walls but can’t quite figure out how to scale them.
It seems to escape this unwanted status quo they’re going to need a bigger boat.
