Tunabunny – Minima Moralia (HHBTM)
Minima Moralia is all about the grain, the noise, the buzz. The grain in a pretty postcard photocopied and photocopied and photocopied until all that’s left is a spider’s web of black and white scribble, the original beauty translated into something entirely other, the ghost of beauty. The grain in reproductions of photographs of reflections. The way that mirrored scenes can be more striking, more touching, than a full-face stare. The way that distorted layers pile on the emotive juice, exchange imagined ‘quality’ for an accumulation of connections and references.
Indeed, you could spend a million dollars on recording and producing, you could breathe in the cash and professionalism and cocaine of the best smoked-glass studio in L.A. for a year, you could try with all your might to conjure up thee perfect grrlpunkrock pop explosion and you would still not be able to make this record. Whatever is essential about this record, whatever is encoded in its bumps and grinds, can’t be replicated with money: it’d take a lack to make it work. And if you don’t think that’s a political act, think again, think harder.
Apart from anything else the soundwaves on Minima Moralia seem to have absorbed their surroundings: you can feel their origins in the scratchy peaks and troughs of these songs, an echolocation that bounces home studios and coffee and a month of all-nighters back at you and rattles them around in yer skull. It’s not as if home recordings, cheap and dirty and immediate, are any more real than the Cowelliest chart pop – fuck real! There is no real – but Minima Moralia manages to trick us into believing that the scuff is what scrabbles at your heart.
Grain is the earth under your nails, it’s angry kids reading anarchist tracts in Snoopy tees, it’s furrowed brows, shrews, scabbed knees, borrowed dresses getting ripped on midnight rambles, it’s contortion, distortion, sense and dissonance, yesterday and tomorrow, ABBA and Crass in a scuffle over the last alcopop of the party. It’s a mess. It makes you wonder why anyone would fall for polished emoting when you can have sulky little songs that kick cans around the yard in stripy knee-socks to let you know how just pissed-off they are and still manage to be adorable as kittens. Kittenish or Kim-ish – pick a Kim, any Kim – Minima Moralia is as cute and snarly and clever as either. Beware its sharp little teeth: this ‘Bunny bites back.
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