Tanlines

Mixed Emotions is the debut album by Tanlines, a Brooklyn NY duo composed of Eric Emm (vocals, guitar, keyboards) and Jesse Cohen (drums, keyboards, bass). Initially born as a production project based out of Emm’s Brooklyn-based Brothers Studio, Tanlines has evolved into a deeply personal, unique electronic pop group. But before there was Tanlines, there was just Eric and just Jesse, working in separate bands and projects until their paths crossed in 2008. Jesse used to play in Professor Murder and Eric was in production duo the Brothers. 

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Blurring the line between production team and band, Tanlines are equally influenced by the overproduced studio pop music of the 1980s and 90s and underground dance music from cultures around the world. Tanlines blend these styles against a backdrop of frantically pulsating rhythms, hypnotic guitar lines, and melodies to form what sounds like pop music from a country that doesn’t actually exist. Tears for Fears as snake charmers. Stock, Aitken, Waterman at Monster Island Basement. The Caribbean’s answer to KLF. Awesome found footage soundtracks from the outer reaches of the internet.

Mixed Emotions is a testament to the benefits and pitfalls of life’s changes, getting older, and being pushed out of one’s comfort zone. The band that was born out of a studio suddenly found themselves without a home base, forced to reevaluate themselves. Emm honed his voice, a confident and tranquil baritone, and focused on lyricism, something he had not done seriously in the past. Many of the songs on Mixed Emotions began as simple songs written on a guitar, with the band later adding their palette of electronic and organic sounds afterwards. Emm sings stories about loss, the passage of time, and the lessons and warnings of accumulated knowledge gleaned by someone who has spent an entire lifetime in music. “This process,” Cohen says, referring to the agita of recording in the midst of the studio loss and its subsequent, sudden adulthood, “felt more like making a movie than an album.” It was a journey that pushed the band to expand their sonic ambitions and away from the comfort of their previous experiences. Perhaps that’s why Mixed Emotions feels so vivid—sometimes painful, sometimes transcendent–a very precise labor of love. It obscures and blurs the lines between synthetic and organic sounds, real and fake, happy and sad. It is the sound of stadium pop in small spaces.