2 out of 5

Label: Ropeadope Records

Produced by: Andrew Gilchrist

From the long bio / copy on the bandcamp page for Drums and Tuba’s 2018 Triumph! – their first release since 2005’s Battles Olé, then with an ampersand in their name – we can learn about Tuba player Brian Wolff and drummer Tony Nozero initially being the sole two ingredients of the band (hence its name) and playing around the streets of Austin, TX; Neil McKeeby would join on guitars at some point prior to the start of the recorded material that was released. So it’s easy to “hear” a narrative there: two dudes are sort of a jam band, local famous but not much more, before McKeeby’s additions allowed them to expand their sound, shaping up enough for a record deal.

Semi-consistent albums dropped for the years thereafter, bridging from post-rock jazz released on My Pal God to grander production and straight rock leanings on Righteous Babe Records, up to the surprising inclusion of Nozero’s vocals on the 2005 album. During the interim between then and Triumph!, Wolff kept making some solo recordings, recruiting another drummer but gearing towards a more stripped down sound – which, to me, ends up forming most of the framework for Triumph!

While I admittedly missed the harder-edge of D&T’s Righteous Babe era, Wolff-solo brought some interesting ideas, and returned somewhat to the more jammy style of the My Pal God stuff. Combined once more with Nozero, who wants to sing on the majority of this album, it ends up carving off an awful lot of the jam, but we’re still far away from rock, pushing us towards a rather minimalist sound of clipped drums, Tony’s flat singing, and Wolff’s experiments on various instruments – tuba, trombone, flute, etc. While the call-and-response style lyrics are a bit cringe (the rhymes are always exactly what you expect, and unfortunately sniff of someone writing words without much direct inspiration), opener This is the Point is a fun little ditty that feels like an intro to possibly more fun: reintroducing this era’s version of the DandT sound. …A little too extensively at a 5:44 runtime, though. And it further turns out that it’s not an intro, and the next several songs all follow almost exactly the same cadence and style, with the addition of a world music vibe adding another dose of mid-life crisis cringe on top of Nozero’s lyrics.

Towards the album’s middle, the group drops some instrumentals that branch out a bit more, and offer up more of the promise felt when initially hitting play – this is Drums and Tuba unleashed from needing to be drums, tuba, and guitar, and feels like longtime session players allowing themselves some freedom, mixed with the familiarity of knowing each as other as bandmates for X amount of years. The tracks high points ultimately still feel like echoes of stronger material from prior ages, but it’s still stuff to get your head bobbing, either way.

Things kind of shift back to the prior style for our final songs, however: there is a “radio edit” of a track that comes from the glut of sound-alikes at the album’s start, and its shortened runtime makes it significantly better; with expectation in check, repeated listens do help to hear how such edits could’ve sharpened the entire thing – I do think Andrew Gilchrist’s production is really oddly dim on this, and did it no additional favors.

Still, even a tighter runtime could’ve sharpened the album only so far. It’s gone silent again since Triumph!, which is too bad; despite my complaints, there’s certainly potential here, and the group already has the chops to act on it – perhaps they just need / needed to go through another cycle of sharpening the D&T sound into something more wholly album ready.