Brooklyn kid finds love, rock ‘n roll in Chicago
6 Jul
In September 2007 Brooklyn native Rashid Lamarre moved from his Yorkville man cave to a lovely semi-detached with his future wife and her little ones. Thankfully he took his guitars with him- after some months of getting a sense of the local scene he was well on his way to putting a new band together. With Jamie McGaw, Kyle Hartman, and Ryan Staples, Lamarre soon released a four song EP under the name The Black Tape.
Steeped in equal parts sixties pop and nineties indie, The Black Tape EP shows a band as comfortable with each other as it shows the maturing of Lamarre as a songwriter. In Tiny Robot, his last effort in New York, the songs were morose and overly long, like a series of consoling conversations with a lovelorn teenager. Here, Lamarre gives us four songs that show that rather than wallow in misery or self-pity, melancholy need not be expressed solely through copious tears and four minute guitar solos. “Everytime I Stop To Breath” and “Summertime” are not exactly happy songs, but that’s not really the point. No part of life exists in a bubble; a good artist knows to hedge the bright and twee with a minor seventh hanging off the end-just enough to pull us back from the event horizon of obnoxious rapture. They must also know when to wink and nod as we approach the emotional rock bottom that is a singularity of shit.
It’s a fine line to walk: for god sakes, the man sings “I love you, I love you” over and over again; rather than reach to throw the speaker against the nearest wall you can find, this is the refrain that stays with you the longest of any phrase on the EP. Gentle, sincere, and even somewhat strained, it is a phrase offered as much as an apology as a promise; he’s singing it not to an object of obsession, but to someone so totally human and infuriatingly loveable that they indeed stop the breath. And all that to the “Be My Baby” beat.
If you have not heard The Black Tape please click here to listen. By all means, there are loose spots- this is a self-produced EP by a relatively new band that has played out a lot since recording this, so I can only assume the live show delivers on the promise (an East Coast tour would be nice). Regardless, The Black Tape deserves a listen.
