Tulipomania’s music is built on conflict and contrast, a series of internal battles between hazy dream-pop and angular indie, between fractious and shattered vocals and muscular beats, swirling psychedelia and sonorous, drifting keyboard washes, between sinister atmospherics and raw guitars. The symphonic landscaping found here is reminiscent of that point when Talk Talk, and they freely acknowledge Mark Hollis’ influence at work, crossed from its pop roots to their richer post-rock phase.
The charm of the music is that it twins a robustness in its back beats with a melancholy and almost feyness in its vocals, a balancing act that makes the finished effect as beautifully shocking and wonderfully jarring as it is unique. On the Outside is a dark and sinister affair and Don’t Be So Sure seems built more of frayed nerves and fear than words and music.
If punk music had been a quest for beauty rather than deliberate grotesqueness or goth had craved the light rather than become obsessed with darkness, those movements may have produced their own Tulipomania. Not to worry though, we got there in the end.
