Culture

Rating: 1.5/5

Tahuna Breaks have taken their time with this one. Their newest album, Shadow Light, has been five years in the making, and Tahuna Breaks seem to be mighty proud of it. They themselves describe it as being “bigger, darker and heavier” than their earlier releases – if you define “darker” as meaning “more funky” then that’d be pretty accurate, but I don’t think most people do.

The album starts off with a fairly standard 14-second intro before dropping into danceable but unremarkable track “Lady,” which runs for almost six minutes for no apparent reason. The next track “Smooth” is almost identical, but only four minutes in length. This cycle continues for the remainder of the album, with the same song essentially varying slightly in length repeatedly, only deviating on the power ballads “Brand New” and “Fearless.”

I don’t mean to be a cynical hipster, as the turn-ups on my jeans might suggest. The tracks are danceable and likeable if you’re not looking for a challenge. But I get the impression that the fairly extreme seven-man lineup the band has adopted led to a proportional dilution of their vision. Seven guys arguing about how the music should sound is only really going to lead to a very safe compromise, of which this music seems to be the result.

Personally, I’d rather they’d had a few more raging arguments to shake up the terrain a little more. Even on the first listen, my index finger was hovering over the skip button just to check if the songs really were all like that (spoiler: they were). Two of them are actually remixes of songs already on the album, which is cheating, really.

The genre my iTunes came up with was “reggae,” and I’ve heard them referred to as “roots,” but that’s really more appropriate for their earlier music than the direction of Shadow Light, which is more standard dance-funk. In fact, they seem to have abandoned their roots in roots (a change I wasn’t rooting for – sorry), seemingly catering for the drunk and bored demographic on a standard Saturday night. It doesn’t suit them.

I don’t want to scare you away – there may be some of you out there whose lives would be changed by listening to this album. But if that is you, I’d recommend reassessing your life, because you really mustn’t do much in your free time.