Shoegaze is our kind of Self Care- a Closer Look at Tender Time's Latest Record.

By Cole Young

Vancouver music scene veteran James Gibbs has been busy over the years playing in bands such as Re/Gen, Walter TV and Yoon and now comes a new solo project under the name Tender Time. If you’re familiar with the workhorse’s catalogue Tender Time ranges closer to the Re/Gen side of things but it definitely has its own flavour.

The album, Self Care is full of heavy-hitting rhythm sections made up of deep sounding drum machine beats and simple, punchy accompanying bass lines. The trancy, verbed out echoing guitar riffs add a spooky element throughout the piece that make the listener feel like they’re floating through space for the nearly half-hour adventure. 

There are several points throughout the album where all you can do is sit there with your eyes closed and listen to the subtly technical acid shoegazey waves coming at you, you feel stoned without even smoking any weed and then suddenly a drumbeat will come in and you’ll suddenly notice that you’re grooving without even meaning to. This is the kind of album that takes a few run-throughs to really get. At first, it’s a little overwhelming-- the combination of the heavy kick drum met with the spaced-out guitar riffs and majorly verbed vocals - more on them in a second - is hard to really grasp. The listener can fall behind trying to figure out what they just heard and meanwhile a whole new song is well on its way. However, as you spend more time on the album you’re able to follow all the different parts and keep up the whole way through. Doing so you’re able to enjoy each song more and more the more you listen to them.

Now a quick word on the vocals. They’re powerful, purposeful, honest and grappling, especially as aforementioned, the more times you listen. I find this quite impressive seeing as you can hardly make out a single word throughout the entire album. You can occasionally make out a word or two but it ain’t easy through the immense amount of reverb tackled onto Gibbs’ voice. On top of this, there are no lyrics posted on the Bandcamp page. It makes one think that maybe Gibbs doesn’t want us to know exactly what he’s saying. We can definitely feel the album maybe we don’t have to actually understand it, that could be his little secret. With a title like Self Care maybe that’s the whole point.

Check the album out here and let the world wash away.