Hearing this duo’s up-close voices transports you to one of the best kinds of after-the-party parties, when the poseurs have gone home and a few remaining friends congregate on the stairs, swap their stilettos for socks, and finally start telling the truth. This is one personal conversation we actually feel privileged to overhear: the duo tell arresting stories with their intertwining vocals and subtle arrangements combining guitar, violin and piano, and ridiculous on-stage banter. They are a little bit folk and a little bit country. They have burlesque cabaret songs and electronic moments. The result is something that takes “folk duo†and gives it an entirely new, entirely feline spin: the bastard love-child of Portishead and Ray Lamontagne. And they are lovely to look at with their soft shiny coats.
The duo started when Ade, after finishing his Honours degree in Composition, was working as a keys player for Tobias Cummings and the Long Way Home, Brendan Welch, and 72 Blues, among others, and found himself writing a stash of songs that were all dressed up but had nowhere to go. In a performance on a dusty, discarded guitar in an unfamiliar apartment to Jane Hendry, a singing voice was discovered where previously it was thought there was not one. Jane added her haunting, angelic voice to the mix and sparked the realization that this might be a tiger with legs. Their most popular song, the haunting “Alleywayâ€, made its own way out of the abandoned guitar, performed as it was composed. Its Sunday-morning pace has you thinking that this is going to be a chill lullaby until you realise what they’re singing about. This spark that dances between the music and an incongruous set of lyrics is there in many of the songs. It’s this tension and frisson that sets the group apart from any predictable canon of folk duos.
To hop aboard The Tiger and Me train (or ride the tiger)
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