The debut Tourists album is out now on Modern Sky UK.
It’s not clear whether Tourists named themselves ironically or not.
From the sleepy retirement destination of Torquay, about as far as you can get from the music industry’s zeitgeist as possible, under normal circumstances in the summer months of the year it’s overrun with just those kinds of visitors, celebrating the rustic paraphernalia of an English seaside town.
Perhaps the truth though is a little more complicated. A quintet who have gradually evolved into something quite musically striking, the overriding impression from their debut album is that of innocents trying to escape from themselves, their work layered and enigmatic, whilst in singer James Coile they possess a frontman with a dream-giving voice.
Tourists have made themselves a composite of well-thumbed influences – The Cure, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Stone Roses, The Wild Swans – but whilst in some ways this is familiar sonic territory, it’s often hard to see where the old times are lost and the new era begins.
Opener Silent Type opens up this domain, raking over elements of scratchy post-punk and very, very icy synths before giving way to haunting melodies which ultimately come to dominate most things.
If originally the raincoated, early 80s shy lads were driven by the dual threat of the bomb and robots taking over everyone’s lives, this century’s crop of waxing and waning paranoias fill Another State with little mind attacks, the opaque swirl of Remains written about a high profile suicide, while Perception Management takes aim at the hypocrisy of drug legislation, in the bittersweet mode of soundalikes DIIV.
Like propaganda from an unidentified source, the grandiose backdrop is punctured by lyrical subversion and biting back against the norm. On Align, the punching drums and eventual guitar screams sit inside the straitjacket of how it feels to be a contemporary musician, scars partially left by the two-year gap between recording this material and giving it to the public.
Lego Man, despite its title, is about love, but in keeping with the rough patchwork of its contemporaries, charts the bliss as it turns to decay, affection becoming manipulation.
Amongst this wreckage, to uncover anything gleaming in the half light is unexpected, but on Faults the gentle psychedelic pitter-patter and crystalline guitars seem to have been salvaged direct from 1989, the song a refugee from its co-conspirators, but a relieving palmful of smiles and happiness.
Being from somewhere that has so many transient visitors passing through it, projecting their temporary lives into its fabric can force the permanent inhabitants of somewhere into seeing no value in it.
On Another State, Tourists have used their energy to slip back between the best and worst of times – and in doing so have made songs that belong exactly where you want them to.
8/10
