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"Having relived the cool parts of the ‘70s 20 years later in the ‘90s, I guess it’s now time to relive the uncool parts. Not that A Tundra aren’t cool; with song titles like “I Had a Dream That We Had A Song Called Which One of You Cokehead Motherfuckers Wants to Fight” and “Wow, That Traffic Light Has Really Changed,” I was expecting an album of razor-tongued nastiness in the vein of Mclusky, Liars, and other bands with spanky song titles. Instead, I got a double-exposure of Gentle Giant and Captain Beefheart, run through a ‘Dan Bejar’ Photoshop filter. And that’s okay too, I suppose!
According to the one-sheet that came with the promo, A Tundra play “rock music, in theory.” To my ears, the part that fits is “theory.” I’d guess that at least two members of the band have some jazz albums. That is admittedly pure conjecture, based on their mercurial chord shifts and busy rhythms. What isn’t pure conjecture is the presence of an eclectic collection of noisemakers, which include plinky pianos, melodious mallets, squirty synths, and a pretty delay pedal that they apply to tracts and tracts of guitar tracks. Man Or Woman, Laughing Or Crying appears to have been self-produced, and whoever did that (Donny Mahlmeister, apparently) deserves some credit. Bits of music are abruptly reversed, reduced to noise, blended with snippets of otherness, chopped, and transformed into coffee percolators seemingly effortlessly and without any of the Pro Tools-fatigue that eventually drives other ‘experimental’ rockers into the arms of insanity, premature death, or minimalism.
The band conjures some worthwhile grooves out of these bits and pieces. The first song — the one with the absurdly long title that I am not going to repeat — gets some mileage out of denseness. “Boner On The One” and “Candy Covered Corpse” traipse through the fields of worldbeat and come out smelling clean as well, which is a rarity. It’s too bad that the band rarely lingers on any of these for long enough to really enjoy them before embarking completely without warning on a flight of proggy fancy. Maybe A Tundra are trying too hard; maybe they just bore really easily. Unfortunately, I’ve used up my quota for unsubstantiated conjecture, so it is there that the matter will have to rest.
Actually, I have one other completely baseless, unsubstantiated criticism to lob before I summarize, tell you what I’ve told you, and submit this essay to the teacher for a completion grade. It pertains to personality. See, I had my hopes so raised by the flashes of sardonic humor in the song titles that the sort of wishy-washy indie-folky-preciousness of the actual singing was, on the balance, a bit of a letdown. It almost seems as though the singer lacks faith in his vocal effusions, to the extent that they are deliberately obscured behind the apparently unrelated signifiers on the back cover — which is a pity, because the playing is muscular and confident, and if life were fair, everything else about the record would’ve been too. Wait, that was conjecture again, wasn’t it? Dammit. I suppose I’ll just have to keep the proceedings a bit more focused next time — which is, by complete coincidence, the same suggestion I would humbly offer A Tundra." by Joseph Hale, Tiny Mix Tapes
"This local four-piece fakes you out almost constantly: a typical song might start with cascading noise-damaged blues, then morph improbably into cold and atonal piano pop, then split the difference with a surprise ending in which precision rock showboating meets those chilly ivories uptown. A Tundra’s debut, Man or Woman, Laughing or Crying (Staticstation), is haunted by the busy, muscular sounds of Chicago math past but puts a sassy, very contemporary obtuseness up front: the singing is arch and literary, the keys are unadorned and fluid, and both sound purposely misplaced. At times it sounds like each player is clinging hard to his or her own vision, and though the results can be confusing, the band is better for it." —Jessica Hopper, The Chicago Reader
“…A marvel of skillful animation, witty songwriting and smart planning. It is designed to delight…every conceivable stripe. Teen-agers will appreciate the…rebellious heroine, a spunky, flirty little nymph who defies her father’s wishes when she leaves his underwater kingdom to explore the world above the ocean’s surface.” –Janet Maslin
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