Several minutes into a 10-song set at Cafe Nine, Sam Carlson, singer and guitarist for The Tines, took a moment to announce that their new single had been released that very day, and here it was. After a metronomic ticking from drummer Chris Mala, twinned guitars heralded the song, “Cul de Sac,” with amplitude, a brisk and driving number that was nevertheless relaxed and wistfully sung. “Wish I had skinny limbs languid and lithe / Stretching like plants towards the windows and skies / Wish I was seventeen but still this wise.” Carlson played rhythm and Ilya Gitelman played lead, although the guitars were often and effectively doubling on the main riff. It was quick, less than two minutes long, but pleasingly paced, with drums hitting hard and square and Sean Koravo syncopating on bass with tender, articulate fuss.
“Cul de Sac” is the opening track on The Tines’ new album, Barrows, releasing tomorrow. In its lyrical references to Proust and to outdoor spaces that both accommodate and stifle growth, it evokes both creative energy and youthful energy. Barrows, Carlson later tells me, was assembled from songs that had come to feel like they belonged together, with a through line ruminating over an individual’s place in the world. “It’s not really an album world at the moment, but we were hoping to make a good album that had pacing and felt like it had narrative structure.”
Outliers surfaced in the three-odd years of Barrows’s making, and they became pure singles. A total of four, released throughout 2024, still formed a kind of outline of the album to follow. The Tines played one of those singles during the show, “Emptied & Refilled,” which likewise benefitted from uncommonly cooperative bass and drums, one pulsing out rhythmic fills the other finished. “That was Sean on the rock and roll bass,” Carlson joked over a last burst of microphone feedback, relishing the impersonation of a small-town talent show emcee.
The set ended in uncharted territory. Songs were faster, played no less nimbly but swapping in some quasi-punk aggression. The chorus of one, tentatively titled “Cartoon Violence,” was shrieked to the rafters. It was a sign that the completion of Barrows—from songs that Carlson had written up to a decade ago—had freed a lot of pent-up energy. “It’s like putting away old ideas and making room for new ones,” Carlson explains. “We’re kind of halfway through writing the next album and have already started recording [it]. So it’s cleaning the cobwebs out.” The Tines, if you can’t already tell, identify as an album band. “We’re never not working on some kind of record,” Carlson says, joking, “We’re Connecticut’s most working-on-a-record band.”
Then there is the band’s self-titled debut album, from 2022, whose songs registered as both familiar and fresh to the Cafe Nine show’s near-capacity crowd. The Tines gig regularly, here and elsewhere, which will bring them to Europe in May. The set had opened with that album’s cathartically hopeful closer “Moon Views.” Another spirited track, “Chokeberries,” was offered up for a friend’s birthday.
The Tines, for their part, were born in a recording studio. Carlson had founded Sans Serif Recording in 2018, initially operating as a scrappy mobile recording unit. In early 2020, Carlson assembled a band to tour an album he had made by himself in his apartment. In partnership with fellow musician and producer Pat Dalton, he had also just outfitted a brick-and-mortar recording space, in a warren of offices and maker spaces on Chapel Street. Then the pandemic arrived in Connecticut, and officials put bands, studios and everything else on indefinite hiatus. “So I wound up just saying, ‘If you want to test [the studio] and hang out for an hour, you can come and play bass on something and you can come and play drums on something.’ And we wound up sort of making this five-track EP, probably like three months into the pandemic.”
Pandemic conditions extended through 2021, and the full-length, self-titled album followed. Carlson’s studio was uniquely suited to a working method that tiptoed around quarantine restrictions, isolating the players with their own copies of the song in progress. Carlson recorded himself with a guitar, then sent the audio file to then-drummer J Thompson, then to Koravo, the bass player, then to Gitelman—all of whom proceeded to work out their parts at home. Once in the studio, they were masked, headphoned and playing into their own direct input boxes. An instrument played this way, Carlson explains, “is not bleeding into anything else,” or, in pandemic-speak, passing its viral load to other instruments. “So you can redo whatever you want infinitely. And we did! I feel like, at the end of the album, I don’t know if we kept a single thing from the original takes,” he says, comparing the album to Theseus’s ship.
Interviewed in the wake of The Tines, Carlson provisionally characterized its genre as “indie sleaze” rooted in the 1980s. That being a decade when indie bands—the first artists to be labeled as such—pushed back against a prevailing production style that fetishized electronic noises and manufactured ambience—pop, basically. In opposition, they tended to keep the fidelity low, the mix flat, and the hooks buried. Lyrics tended to be bone-dry or obscurely circumspect. By contrast, though, The Tines’ debut arrived with melody and craft. Chords progressed, allowing choruses to provide musical answers to the verses. Earnestness and vulnerability crept in. The aforementioned “Chokecherries” begins with the question, “Which one of us will be the next one to be married?” Koravo’s accompanying bass, meanwhile, preserves the springy boing of its plucked string, and the mix opens up an airy chasm between the two parts.
Carlson sings in a smooth, sleepy register, wistful or grateful in a way that feels earned after a long night. His lyrics, alert to the significance of everyday things, seem to begin as free verse (He was a student of English at Southern Connecticut State University) before they’re nudged into songhood with soft rhyme and repetition.
Carlson and his bandmates have each been involved in other local bands. Carlson names four or five of his own, including Ports of Spain, the two-man live-looping act he still performs with Gitelman. (When in Spain, Carlson plays the drums.) But The Tines became Carlson’s primary preoccupation as a musician, in part because it’s where state and local funding for music and performance in the heat of the pandemic found him. The Tines’ EP came out on a label (Funnybone Records) that had been awarded a state grant for quarantine-made music. And when music venues began livestreaming shows from their shuttered performance spaces, The Tines happened to be ready with their instruments and their new material.
But The Tines also endured for their functionality as an ensemble. “Everyone in the group writes music and everyone in the group has a good artistic sensibility, a good sense of right and wrong,” Carlson says. “I tend to sit on the couch and write a song on an acoustic guitar while watching The Sopranos. And then if something seems cool, I’ll bring it to the group, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, I have 50 percent of something. Do you like it? And if they like it, they finish it.” Once the quarantine lifted, the band began playing together weekly to shepherd songs more or less to completion. The studio then became a space where all manner of sonic coloration could be added.
“Anyone who’s worked on something here can probably tell you, I really like the mucking-around and finding-fun-noises side of it… What can you add to it that makes it a little bit larger than life? That sort of weird sound-hunting, problem-finding stage is always very fun.”
A song called “Centuries Long” is grounded by a tape loop that combines a recorded whirring noise with a dull pop made by a piece of masking tape over the gap. As the song proceeds, the strings inside a piano are directly plucked and the piano itself is being used as a resonator. “So part of the vocal track was pumped into the back of the piano, and then miked from above through the piano,” Carlson explains, “so you can kind of hear the strings activating” with the voices.
The tools at The Tines’ disposal can also be used to create sonic space in a song that bears little resemblance to the studio’s actual working space. “White Birds,” from Barrows, is an exquisitely constructed track with an acoustic guitar and a musical box chime that play as if they are just on the other side of the speaker, while electric guitar and bird-like cries sound from an illusory distance of some several hundred feet away.
To Carlson, the sound of Barrows had to be exportable, as much as it could be, to the live setting. “I love recorded music and, in my mind, I’m always excited to hear the thing that I’ve heard performed in a repeatable way.” To achieve a studio-sounding live track, Carlson and Gitelman had brought fully stocked pedal effects boards to the Cafe Nine show. On the stage, looking like Mission Impossible briefcase bombs, they changed the sonic identity of the guitars that were plugged into them. “Seawalls,” for instance, opened with a ringing, searching guitar that sounded nothing like the fuzz riffs employed elsewhere. “There’s an extent,” Carlson says, “to which, between the two of us, I’m sort of playing the song, like I’m playing the form of it, and [Gitelman’s] kind of doing arrangement and production stuff in real time. Playing the pedal board to add and subtract bits from it as the song goes through.”
Very little adding and subtracting was required, however, for what might be considered the album’s centerpiece. “Among The Copper” closes the first half of Barrows with just the four instrumental voices, evenly blended. It’s the oldest of the songs, written after Carlson had lost many of his worldly possessions to a fire. “At the time, I happened to be on a camping trip with a bunch of old friends. And I remember being out in the woods and looking around at all the interconnectivity of the trees and the water and the land and eventually being like, ‘Well, none of this needs my closet full of stuff…’ It was maybe the first time in my life that I felt something like what Romantic poets would call the sublime. A sense of wonder in smallness.”
Appropriately, the song that came out of that moment could well have been recorded in an empty room, using just enough gear as can be carried by four players, finding even in such absence a composed and crafted presence.
Written by David Zukowski. Image 1, featuring (from left) Chris Mala, Sean Koravo, Ilya Gitelman and Sam Carlson, provided courtesy of The Tines. Images 2, 5, 6 and 7, featuring The Tines performing at The State House in 2023, photographed by Dan Mims. Images 3 and 4, featuring the studio’s control room (top) and live room (bottom), provided courtesy of Sans Serif Recording.
