Tusk dismantled and spread through Mirage and Tango

[aleuzzi]

When I was very young and first heard TUSK (the single) I was confused and completely enthralled. THIS was the same band that made the previous album I’d heard 3000 times before the age of eight? I loved the drums, the horns, the video...

When I was still young and first played through the TUSK album, I was confused, somewhat deflated, yet oddly intrigued. Very few things struck me as perfectly realized moments of pop but many, many fragments and moments were quite stunning. I quickly realized that was the point—fragmentation and excess were the aesthetic principles of the record. And when I mean excess, it’s as much about the exceeding spareness in Christine and Stevie’s songs as it is about Lindsey’s frenzied experiments. For a band that claimed “less is more” as a motto, they outdid themselves here. “Storms,” “Angel,” “Never Make Me Cry,” “Over and Over” and “Sisters” are treated with deliberate simplification. Only “Sara,” “Brown Eyes,” “ That’s All” and “Beautiful Child” embrace full-scale orchestration—and in those cases it seems as if this is to prove a point: we CAN do it, but we choose not to most of the time.

Case in point: One can’t help but think “What would ‘Never Forget’ sound like if it were arranged and recorded in the manner of “Don’t Stop” or “YMLF?” It has all the trappings of a hit but is stripped of all that “cream on top” (Mick’s phrase) that carried a good song into the top ten. The decision to record crude and/or bare arrangements of these songs with such precision is one of TUSK’s primary head scratchers. It’s an experiment that initially seemed to fail but over time reveals itself as evidence of Lindsey’s genius. One of the reasons TUSK ages so well is because the songs do not succumb to stock-in-trade treatments that would render the songs bland decades later. Instead, we get these well-crafted folk-rock songs immortalized through eerie reverb and aggressive spareness. It’s the aural equivalent of certain scenes from Kubrick’s “2001.”