BAND OF THE WEEK: DOUG TUTTLE

How do we love this self-titled album by Doug Tuttle? Let us count the ways.

Through our countless encounters with the album’s eleven songs, however, we find we’ve lost count. If we were to begin with the extra-terrestial tape manipulation that starts “With Us Soon,” and stop with the transcendent bass-line that lies at the core of album-ender “Better Days (Wools Grown Lighter),” and then add up all of the tiny treasures in-between, we’d surely wind up with a sum reaching into the millions.

Instead of counting these million things, we turn to another question: What’s not to love?

Don’t ask us. Not that we’re looking, but we haven’t found anything. At all. We’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time with this album since its release earlier this year  (while also having the distinct pleasure of seeing Mr. Tuttle and his stellar, snappy band play these songs on the water, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas). And through it all, our affection for the album has only grown. Where you plant your love is where it grows, dude. Turn this love … up.

From start to finish, we find Doug Tuttle’s album absolutely magnificent, memorable song merging into memorable song, all with hooks sweet enough to make our knees buckle.

It’s been said that one can’t really, truly love an album until they’ve committed themselves to drawing a comically sub-standard interpretation of the album’s cover art work with Sharpie’s, on a home-burned CD for the car.

Actually, we don’t think that anyone has ever said that, about anything, until now. Which is appropriate, because that’s what we did with Doug Tuttle’s self-titled album, an album we truly love.

Doug Tuttle’s self-titled album is available from Trouble In Mind Records. 

“We are designed to come back together once more, and we all exploded outward way back when so that we could begin the long, slow climb back into each other’s arms. Without distance, without being apart, we could never then become one. If we were still packed together in that infinitesimally dense cosmic seed, where your lung was my hand and my thoughts were your blood, we could never bear witness to oneness, which is a beautiful thing and deserves an audience. Things flow into each other and back to themselves, gaining themselves through the other and the other through themselves. It’s natural. Everything falls into its proper place after spending some time apart.” – Shozan Jack Haubner