You’ll never be able to feel more alone than your favourite songwriter did while penning their best songs. Sure, you may be regretful of all the things that you didn’t say or do that led you to the place that you are right now. But, I am confident that there’s an exact song playing in someone’s headphones that makes all of your grief sound like a walk in the park.
Are these songwriters some kind of martyrs? Are they experimenting with outrageously intense feelings for some kind of research program? That’s doubtful! Maybe what the likes of Tarul are doing is writing the kinds of stories that so many people feel aching in their bones and so few others have the talent to articulate.
To paraphrase a Beatle – Life’s what happens while you’re busy trying to get rich. San Franciscan-based Tarul has seen firsthand the result of both ambition and too much leisure time. He’s also seen what can happen to a person’s soul while they’re busy worrying about all the things that they do not have. On the artist’s third album, “Whether by nature or nurture, small,” goes back to basics, to the stories that truly matter.
These are the stories that can’t be lost, regardless of what happens around you. Take the lush, shoegaze-inspired opener “Looms,” a mournful track about loved ones that have passed on and the guilt of not being able to trade anything for more time with them.
Or, listen to the dynamic “Baccus,” a song that brings to mind 2000s American indie-rock, a tune about impossible Summer love affairs. “The worse things happen to me,” Tarul sings, and, in that instant, you can’t contest that the artist really feels this way.
If Tarul’s taking listeners on a journey of the myriad of meaningful things and the handful of irreplaceable feelings in his life, the journey also includes an introduction into well-respected indie, shoegaze, and alternative rock.
You’ll find traces of The Strokes on the hopeful “Freckles,” the catchiest number on here. You may take a deep rest, hearing “In the Dark (All of the Stolen Faces),” a track cognate with the sound of My Bloody Valentine. And, you might even find the pleasant bedroom pop sound that your modern sensibilities are searching for on the track “False Ends.”
Where does it all leave us? “Whether by nature or nurture, small” sounds like the diary of someone who has used their Summer holiday to journey as far as they could go and accumulate as much experience as possible with the goal of finding what’s true and what’s not. As it turns out, Tarul’s realised that there are most things with which one can live without. The things that one can’t let go are the ones someone will write a song that, at some point, will make you feel not quite so lonely.
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