WAR brings Tara out from behind her fortress of synths and horror soundtracks and back to center stage as a songwriter and performer. Shapeshifting into a spiky-crowned, combat boot-clad banshee, the album sinks its teeth into themes of addiction and mental illness. The result is WAR – a dense, intense, thick-as-a-brick witch’s brew of vintage synths and machines, skull-bruising drums, and that voice.
For the making of WAR, Tara brought her works to Sheffield producer Dean Honer, one of the masterminds behind The E.R.C, All Seeing I, The Moonlandingz & I Monster, and producer of records by bands such as Add N to X and The Human League. Over the next 3 years, they co-produced WARremotely between Tara’s Los Angeles studio and Dean’s Sheffield-based studio. As one might expect, WAR recruits a fierce army of synths and drum machines in its production ethos – yet also welcoming into the fold satisfyingly incongruent elements such as woodwinds and both acoustic and bass guitar. Tara’s voice, the central storytelling instrument, is also pummeled and pitch bent, crunched through fuzz pedals and vocoders and even morphed into a vicious synth bass by Tara singing through her vintage Korg MS-20.
I Speak Machine will bring the album to the live stage on a European tour supporting Gary Numan.
May 24 | Dublin — IE | Olympia Theatre
May 26 | Amsterdam — NL | Melkweg
May 27 | Aarhus — DK | Train
May 29 | Copenhagen — DK | Amager Bio
May 30 | Oslo — NO | John Dee (Ved Rockefeller)
May 31 | Malmo — SE | Kulturbolaget
June 2 | Berlin — DE | Columbia Theater
June 3 | Warsaw — PL | Progresja
June 7 | Paris — FR | Le Cabaret Sauvage
June 10 | Madrid — SP | Sala But
June 11 | Barcelona — SP | Sala Razzmatazz
June 13 | Brussels — BE | Ancienne Belgique
June 14 | Munich — DE | Backstage Werk
June 15 | Leipzig — DE | Taubchenthal
June 16 | Hamburg — DE | Markhalle
June 17 | Frankfurt — DE | Batschkapp
