Tara Clerkin Trio - Somewhere Good LP

Just as the trip-hop revival of the past few years seemed to be reaching critical mass, the latest Tara Clerkin Trio long player seems to have pushed a new breath of life into it. To my ear, the approach here seems different to the previous two 12”s, but a few trusted regulars mentioned to me that this sounds up the alley of their debut LP so it’s not a total departure. Skittering drums and dubby bass lines nod to their Bristol-based lineage, but are joined by woodwinds and acoustic instrumentation and at times a pop-song-structure approach. At the risk of mapping historical timelines onto the present, it feels like this LP approaches the post-trip-hop moment, recalling later artists such as Beth Orton taking a slightly more left-of-field approach (ie. this is music that someone lazy would call ‘chill’ even though it would not fit comfortably alongside Michael Buble on a Chill FM ad) while also drawing on contemporaries such as Dean Blunt. Nice stuff!
–Mitch