Album Review – Waiting Here by Tough Age (2023) (Bobo Integral)
Vancouver’s Tough Age have been with us for a decade now and feel like they have matured somewhat. For there was once a time when the trivial but enthusiastic micro-blogs (like ours) were falling over each other in the fight to claim them as pop rock, power-pop, pop punk, jangle-rock, and all manner of genres that temporarily crop up periodically between the crevices of the real ones.
Essentially, they were too pretty and too noisy to really sit comfortably anywhere but within the realms of their own melodic shoutfest energy.
Five albums in, and Waiting Here finally seals its place in the jangle-pop annals proper. Of course their inimitable thrill is still present with Give It Day, Hideaway, and Narrative Text, offering their signature roughshod, ramshackle jangle-pop in abundance, but it just now feels more refined and controlled, held together by the brilliance of Jarrett Samson, whose vocals are smooth enough to assume ‘pretty’ whilst being languid enough to tether any punk excess to a slacker-pop lethargy.
In fact, this controlled sense of ‘melodic languid’ is what makes Waiting Here truly excel as the band moves forward with even more fervent steps into the Kiwi/Dunedin Sound vibe they have been hinting at in more recent releases.
As such, In A Garden and Paradise By Another Name are swathed in the tight, crystalline, jangled riffs of The Clean, while the dulcet, downplayed jangle of Scattered, Getting Closer, and the title track are the best The Bats songs that the Kiwis never got around to writing.
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