4 out of 5

Label: Secretly Canadian

Produced by: The Impossible Shapes

The companion piece to the preceding Horus, Tum seems, perhaps, like a well-sequenced set of B-sides – ideas that didn’t fit within Horus‘ mythology, or the overall feel of that album. The songs here are definitely more topically vague than the concepts of that album, and perhaps even more open-ended than the band’s loosey-goosey feels-good songs on the whole: Tum is not a disc that gives me a very strong sense of identity.

However, the nod to the sequencing is not admitted in passing: the way the disc is structured, with some instrumental tunes repeating a melody at various points, though in drastically different constructions – centered around dramatic strings, or wandering guitar – acts as a guardrail to the experience, or like the divots in the side of the road that keep you awake should you drift. Inbetween, IS volley between some of their most satisfyingly direct pop, and blissed out folk, and then those always-awesome bursts of freak out rock, and its sputtered at us in short but sweet tracks that are just long enough to establish head-bobbing familiarity, but exit out before the relative simplicity has one skipping to the next song.

The ebb and flow really is quite amazing, as I’m brought to think of weird folksters who do the short-song thing – Danielson Famile; Half-handed Cloud – and it’s very often the case that I only remember the first half of any given album, and the rest is a blur. Tum, by having the borders of that repeated melody, kind of keeps recentering the listen, and then “feels out” how far afield it can go in each individual section. If you gather all the songs in a pile, they don’t have much in common outside of those border tracks, but the way in which they’re presented corrects for that as much as possible. So while it might not be a disc that carries with it a set feel, or builds in the way something like We Like It Wild did, it’s also quite a wonderful, and satisfying tour of the different sides of the band, pared down to a very digestible format.