Band : Tommigun
Album title : Come Watch Me Disappear
Label : Excelsion Recordings
Distributor : V2
Release date : 17/05/2010
Release : CD

Tommigun is an exciting new band from Brussels (Belgium) which was founded last year by lead singer/ guitarist Thomas Devos [formerly of rumplestichkin, the band which left us two delectable full-length albums (2003’s Small-Time Hero and 2005’s Somersault), Devos also contributed to other projects (including Les Enfants De L’Yser) and composed for theater and television] and keyboardist/ backing singer Joeri Cnapelinckx (of Kawada and De Anale Fase repute).

According to the info at excelsior-recordings.com, the two friends (who were already occupied writing songs for a new project together) came up with the name in a somewhat weird manner. The duo had gone to Devos’ father’s farm in Attica (that’s up-state Ney York, I guess, in between Buffalo and Rochester) to relax a bit, and that’s when they found father’s Tommy guns (the actual submachine gun developed by Thompson, you know). They took out the old Chevy Nova, loaded with a bunch of extra ammonition drums, to a secluded spot, and started shooting away for some 15 minutes! While taking a break they see this small fire extinguisher in the car, and that’s what they got to shooting up next. Big bang in the open fields, of course, and a lot of silly fun! The duo started shooting at fire extinghuishers every Sunday after that. But they got bored eventually (probably were also running out old fire extinguishers to destroy), decided to start a band together, and called it…Tommigun!

So the duo got to writing songs of a peculiar conceptual nature, dubbing ‘em “heartbreak hangover tunes”, and in it express their feelings of passion and envy. Some songs were written as male-female duets, songs in which one doesn’t know whom exactly is preparing a trap for the other, oothers are male solo, and one sole song is a female solo. Devos and Cnapelinckx then journeyed to San Diego, to record in the studio of The Black Heart Procession’s Pall Jenkins. Meanwhile, the band grew ot to a live quintet with the addition of drummer Mattijs Vanderleeen, bassist Pim de Wolf (check Thou and Waldorf), and female singer Kaat Arnaert (known from Sutrastore). According to Jenkins, he heard in Tommigun “the drive of Pixies, the nostalgia/ melancholy of Chris Isaak or T-bone Burnett, and the sigh of a female nightclub singer”. Soon after the band is asked to serve as openers for Daniel Johnson’s European tour, and they also get sselected to play at Eurosonic 2010.

And that’s not even such a bad descripton! Overall, the music is fairly sedate with hardly distorted guitar and piano as main instruments, but there’s a couple of exceptions (check “Blame Me” and “What Happens Next” for the most electrified songs on the album), and some songs actually drift in between. The piano occasionally veers to the organ sound, but is also known to emulate the sounds of violin or horns (example, the album’s title track, also the only instrumental). Vocally, Devos has somewhat of a moan in most of the songs (he also goes falsetto in “Square Des Blindés”), and Arnaert’s singing adds a really exotic touch to the couple of songs she can be heard in. In my personal opinion, her voice is simply not used enough (only in the duet “Cage Aux Ours” and two female solos “Midnight Spoon” & “Nightwalk”, and possibly she also adds backing vocals to “Blame Me”). I mean, you simply nééd to have heard her, man! Occasionally Cnapelinckx add to the vocal landscape as well, making for a nice variety in this part of the whole! Somehow, I had the impression that a lot of these songs were exceptionally suited for acoustic sets, and see here, one of the two songs posted at myspace.com/tommigunmusic just happens to be an acoustic version of the duet “Cage Aux Ours”, the other being the album opening “Spotlight”, definitely one of the highlights on the album, and one of the tracks (the others being the aforementioned more electrified songs, and the wacky but far calmer female solo “Nightwalk”, which is mostly hardly distorted guitar and piano organ) I would personally put my money in for a radio single! If you’re lucky, you can still catch the band at one of their in-store album presentation shows in May (one left in June as well)

90/100

Tony.