by Ziggy Merritt
photos by Ziggy Merritt
Walking back home from a night at a Making Time event always leaves me with the chills. The hours spent in the often intimate, club settings have a known knack for leaving your voice faded and your ears in a blissful state of shock. I was lucky enough to jump on to the latest in Making Time’s anniversary series of shows, kicking off in bold fashion with the incomparable, Wild Nothing.
Since debuting with Gemini back in 2010, Jack Tatum, the mind behind the jangly, dreamy haze that is Wild Nothing, has forged ahead with bigger and bolder strokes for each successive release. On tour supporting his latest album, Life of Pause, Tatum by all rights seems content but even more than that, happy. Saturday night marked his stop in Philly at 714 to kick off the sixteenth anniversary of Making Time, which began with typical the typical fanfare of selective beats to the tune indietronica darlings like Santigold and M83. Tatum’s eventual arrival onstage was succeeded by an hour long set with ample selections from both Life of Pause and Nocturne along with the throwback to Gemini once the crowd grew hungry enough for it.
But it’s always a treat when the concept and appeal of an album like the krautrock-influenced Life of Pause or the jangly rhythms of his earlier works translate just as well onstage as they do in the studio. This circles back to the sense that Tatum himself is satisfied with where he’s at as he begins to charge forward into more unfamiliar territory with his sound. Fortunately I was able to share a few thoughts with the man himself on these very matters, giving some added perspective on where his inspirations have taken him.
“The more you tour the easier certain things become,” Tatum writes, responding to his growing sense of comfort onstage. “I’ve grown really used to the ins and outs and when it comes to the music, you find over time what works well and what doesn’t work as well. It helps to have musicians playing with me that I really trust to interpret my music.”
Aiding him in that quest are the touring members, Jeff Haley, Nathan Goodman, Jeremiah Johnson, and the recent addition of Real Estate’s Matt Kallman on keyboard. Seeing and hearing the feel of Tatum’s studio releases translated onstage is impressive enough, but to hear some of the night’s highlights, such as his latest release’s title track and “Shadow” from Nocturne, there’s the sense that a practiced familiarity with a full band has resulted in a more than successful dynamic. The sway of the crowd and the obsessive excitement at the foot of the stage that evening would attest to that.
Focusing more on the album, Tatum was able to shed some light on the range of genre and style woven into some of the tracks, particularly “To Know You.” “This album definitely touches on a wider range of influences than the past tracks” he writes. “’To Know You’ was one of the earlier tracks written for this record, at least in the idea phase. I had tried with the song ‘Ride’ from the Empty Estate EP to write something more propulsive. You could say these kind of repetitive songs are rooted in krautrock, particularly Neu, but there’s definitely more of a post punk lean. Something like Tones On Tail. But when I listen to ‘To Know You’ I also think of Gary Numan and even early U2.”
Likewise tracks like “Reichpop” even by just the title alone pay dutiful homage to Tatum’s art rock forebears. “The beginning of ‘Reichpop’ is more influenced by Robert Fripp and Steve Reich,” he writes. “I’ve always been interested in texture and environment though and there’s so much to be inspired by from that period.”
Through and through we’re beginning to see a new more confident approach to what Jack Tatum has been able to build over the past six years with Wild Nothing. Even from his stop here in Philly that’s more apparent than before as he remarked. “I’ve spent a good amount of time in Philly because I’ve got some friends there and would visit often when I lived in New York,” he writes. And for what he looks forward to when coming back to the area? “Looking forward to seeing those friends and hopefully not hitting rock bottom in a catastrophic cheesesteak stupor.”
