Shaun de Waal On tour
On the new Tic Tic Bang! album, Low Riding, two of South Africa’s best young singer- songwriter-guitarists combine their talents to create what could well be the local album of the year. Matthew van der Want and Chris Letcher have meshed to make a multifaceted work full of surprises, an amalgam of folk, rock and hip-hop with something of the attitude of punk.
The two connected while Van der Want was making his first (solo) album, Turn on You, and Letcher was busy with Urban Creep’s debut, Sea Level. Over the next few years Van der Want played as a support act for Urban Creep, sometimes performing as a duo with Letcher.
Thus were seeds of this collaboration sown. The two made the brief, blackly humorous four-song collection EP Tombi before getting to work on what would become Low Riding.
These songs, which the pair had honed in live performance, are not co-compositions. Yet, as Van der Want says, “they’re certainly co-arranged. None of the songs are written by both of us, but as we did them we made changes together and did the acoustic-guitar arrangements, which basically the whole album hangs off. That was very much a two-way process.
“While our songs are different, our approach, our mind-set, is pretty similar, so it was quite a natural thing that we drifted together … Our songs fit together quite nicely, even though the style, especially the lyrical style, is very different. I tend to go for a more linear, narrative thing – not necessarily telling a story, but being pretty direct.”
Letcher’s style is more oblique. “I don’t really write straight at something, I tend to write around it,” he says.
“Chris’s stuff is more of a stream of consciousness, or a loose- associationness,” laughs Van der Want. “He’s an impressionist!”
In fact, the album is a marvel of unity in diversity. You can feel the tensions, the divergent tendencies in different songs, but still they are subsumed in a whole, a complete, complex work that marshalls its parts into an impressive, acute and often moving sum.
At first listen, the opening songs sound folky, with their interplay of two acoustic guitars and harmonising voices. For a moment, you hear an echo of Simon and Garfunkel in the distance. That’s before the distorted electric guitar kicks in Static, like a menacing undertow, and we’re into something entirely different.
Viola, bassoon and other instruments – not to mention loops, indistinctly murmuring voices and the like – are folded into the mix, enriching the sound, giving it some unexpected twists.
“We were quite obsessive about the production of this album,” says Van der Want. Co-produced by Lloyd Ross, stalwart of the great South African alternative rock tradition, the album was partly recorded at the new Shifty studios in Cape Town and partly in a room in a luxurious seaside home. “The guitars and the drums were done at this very larney house in Hout Bay, in this amazing concrete room,” says Van der Want.
“Lloyd was running around like a madman putting mikes in strange places,” says Van der Want. (He even put one in the room next door – in a toilet bowl.)
The connection with Ross links Van der Want and Letcher to forerunners such as the Springs School of James Phillips and Jonathan Handley and the highly individual songwriting style of talents as different as Andr Letoit (Koos Kombuis) and Jennifer Ferguson. What these artists have in common is a desire to create truly South African music, refusing to fall back on the clichs of the global pop machine.
And, in that tradition, Van der Want and Letcher can live with smaller audiences if they have to. They certainly won’t compromise.
As Van der Want says:”When I get despondent it’s quite an uplifting thing to realise that in some way you are doing something important, and, while it may not be reaching millions of people, when you do reach people you reach them in quite a profound way.