Wilson Tanner - Legends LP

Wilson Tanner congregate for another en plein air offering, this time on a biodynamic grape-farm in South Australia. Don’t be turned off by premise as this is not your usual normie trip to the Margaret Valley, nor is it the kind of record you’d necessarily expect from the natural wine worker to music pipeline (personally, my knowledge of this world is contained to Adelaide ex-clean shirt hardcore dudes and Martin Frawley from Twerps), but trust me, there’s plenty of juice in this one to be squeezed.

In the press release for the record, Efficient Space head honcho Michael Kucyk makes it clear that this is a “caricature of Australian viticulture,” and maybe caricature is the active word here, although it’s not so in your face. Think, the double meaning of ‘Legend’ as both nodding to myths of bacchanal debauchery, as well as a word that a tradie (or farmer?) might call you when they’ve forgotten your name.

A booze inflected wooziness directs the whole thing. Guitars, field recordings, synths, etc. are fed into the juicer of a sequencer with lead lines from woodwinds and synths weaving their way throughout. The pair have this uncanny ability to straddle the edges of genres that are either annoyingly lean-back and passive or just totally over cooked by 2025—think ambient jazz, dub wise, or too-old-or-burntout-to-still-doof ‘experimental’ composition—but always skewing the music enough to keep it interesting.

What Michael in the press release calls “bung notes” prevail across the record, and detours into rattling acoustic guitars and firing up synths take this out of quaint soundtrack for a farm-stay territory and into something more reactive, off-the-cuff, and exciting. One for fans of recent classics such as A.R. Wilson’s Old Gold (I mean, he’s one half of the group, but it seems to be veering further into this territory), the warped naturalism of Troth’s debut LP, or the sleepy psychedelia of Yuta Matsamura’s Red Ribbons!
-Mitch