Album Review: Tia Carrera, Tried and True
Posted in Reviews on June 15th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
The prospect of a new Tia Carrera album inherently brings familiar echoes and the promise of something different. On the most basic level, the latest LP’s title, Tried and True, could easily apply to the band’s methodology itself. It is the second record the Austin, Texas-based three-piece have issued since being joined on bass by Curt Christenson, formerly of Dixie Witch, and the fourth overall they’ve done for Small Stone Records. Comprised of five tracks laid out neatly across two LP sides, it is a relatively compact 37-minutes. That’s more or less of a kind with 2019’s Visitors / Early Purple (review here), the two extended tracks of which showed up through Small Stone last Fall as the band’s first full-length release since 2011’s Cosmic Priestess (review here). Why the delay for a band whose guitarist engineers their own recordings and who specialize in jamming out improvised heavy psychedelia? Shouldn’t they be putting out four records per year?
The narrative — blessings and peace upon it — has it that Tia Carrera are perfectionists, and that while they have a vast archive of recorded material, what they consider worth releasing to public ears is in far shorter supply. So be it. The shuffle and swing that takes hold in opener “Layback” and the all-go Hendrixian scorch of the leads in the subsequent “Taos” tell the story, and whatever it may be that holds Tia Carrera back from amassing a huge catalog of LPs, what they do choose to issue certainly has no trouble meeting a high standard. With Erik Conn on drums anchoring the jams as Jason Morales — whose studio is the BBQ Shack, in Austin; Chris Goosman mastered at Baseline Audio Labs in Michigan — tears into one solo after the next and Christenson locks in fluid lines in the low end, each piece is able to hone a spirit of its own despite sharing a stated commonality of approach. It is tried, and it is true. What it isn’t — as Visitors / Early Purple and Tried and True both reaffirm — is broken.
It seems fair to think of the two releases as complements to each other, both because they appear in such quick succession relative to what the band has done before — Cosmic Priestess was preceded by 2009’s The Quintessential (review here) — and because the CD version of Tried and True includes the prior outing’s two extended tracks as bonus cuts. That brings the running time of the CD version of Tried and True to a whopping 71 minutes, which proves to be more than enough time to sink oneself in its ocean of lead lines and expressive exploration, classic boogie and off-the-cuff ramble, be it the scoot of “Swingin’ Wing,” which rounds out side A of the LP but feedbacks and crashes neatly into the fade-in screech and cymbals of “Zen and the Art of the Thunderstorm,” which seems to nod at the verse melody of “Within You Without You” before finding its own tense course for its relatively brief three minutes, which give way to the 14-minute title-track.
“Tried and True” is the longest piece on Tried and True by a margin of two, and makes a ready companion for “Visitors” and “Early Purple,” with a languid guitar solo stretching out over another solidly rhythmic exploration, the band’s reputation for coming up with this stuff on the spot meshing against the presumption that what they’re choosing to deliver on a record is only the best of the best of whatever unknown total amount might exist. The question that raises is whether or not songwriting isn’t the same thing? Aren’t even the most structured of songs at some point born of improvisations just like Tia Carrera‘s tracks here? And the trio’s modus is its own way of carving down the entirety to a piece deemed fit for consumption; they are, in essence, whittling out songs. Through creative fades in and out along the way, a feeling of longer expanse is maintained, and especially on the shorter pieces before the title-track, the sense is of Tia Carrera letting the listener have a snippet of some broader entirety.
In that way, Tried and True is in communion not only with the LP before it — and included with it, when it comes to the CD — but with the larger processes driving the band’s work. One has to wonder if perhaps the alignment of Conn and Morales with Christenson hasn’t reinvigorated the creativity of Tia Carrera as a whole, and if so, if new releases might begin to show up with more regularity, just as this one has followed behind Visitors / Early Purple. I don’t know that, of course, but for a group whose basis is in jamming, the joy of doing so is clearly expressed in these tracks — both long and short — despite whatever personality each might also demonstrate in itself. Cuts like “Swingin’ Wing,” the especially howling “Taos” and “Layback” bring glimpses at what it might be like to be in the rehearsal space with the band while they go, go, go, and on the CD, “Zen and the Art of the Thunderstorm” becomes a transition point to 49 minutes of ripper bliss that are raucous and spacious in kind. Maybe this is just how Tia Carrera roll now, and after more than 20 years together, who could say they haven’t earned the designation of being tried and true — all the more so because they remain so decidedly underrated.
The sonic elephant in the room as regards their style continues to be Earthless, but Tia Carrera distinguish themselves from that three-piece in their method of recording themselves as well as through improvisation, not to mention the personality of their play. Both come through wholly on Tried and True, whether a given listener chases down the vinyl or the compilation Tried & True & Visitors / Early Purple CD (the more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned), and one way or another, Morales, Conn and Christenson shine with engaging, immersive, explosive groover jams that, unless the very idea of such a thing is a turnoff, will be hard to resist. If this is who Tia Carrera are now, and they’re going to start belting out records one after the other after more than two decades of existence, then it only serves to emphasize how righteous the spirit of their creativity has been all along.
