TUATARA

Trading With The Enemy (Epic)

It’s a supergroup, Jim, but not as we know it. Usually this bandying together of musicians from different groups is just a you-slap-my-back-and-I’ll-slap-yours affair, an occasion for the mutual massage of tender egos. Tuatara, though, would appear to be something else entirely.

The core members and producers are The Screaming Trees’ Barrett Martin and Luna’s Justin Harwood. Peter Buck is also prominent while REM session guitar player Scott McCaughey is involved as well. Yet this album bears no trace of any American alt. rock lineage, despite having been recorded in its Mecca (Seattle).

Rather, Tuatara operate on the fringes of what, to all intents and purposes, is world music. What we have here are 12 open-ended instrumentals that essentially take the form of New Age jazz improvs. In festival circuit terms, Tuatara would sound more at home in Montreux than Glastonbury.

Barrett Martin’s drums, congas, bongos, marimbas and Vietnamese woodblocks provide the percussive backbone while Skerik, Steve Berlin, Craig Flory and Christopher Littlefield form the brass neck of trumpets and sax. To complete this orgiastic jam, there are flugelhorns, Hammond organs and of course Peter Buck’s bouzouki.

The result is a lavish and technically spotless album, an 800-legged groove machine that nevertheless feels rather aimless and (at 66 minutes) is certainly one for the patient listener.

The sleeve notes are in Spanish and there are commendable (if excessively worthy) soundings against “a hate-filled America” (the pointed title also suggests a political subtext). Ultimately, Tuatara are impossible to hate but equally hard to love. But if it’s soul food you’re after, prepare to be disappointed: Trading With The Enemy is no meat and too many veg.

Nick Kelly