Wild Nothing
“Paradise”
Nocturne (Captured Tracks, out 8/28)
After listening to “Paradise” for the first time yesterday, I was struck by how much Blacksburg, VA-native Jack Tatum has grown as a songwriter since his impressive debut Gemini dropped two years ago. I remember playing Gemini for my ex, and her response was “if I wanted to listen to the Cure, I’ll just go listen to the Cure.” While I disagreed, she certainly wasn’t wrong. We got a taste of his progression on 2010’s lovely Golden Haze EP — the one that really made me fall in love — but nothing on that feels as fully realized what we’ve heard so far from Nocturne.
Tatum’s voice is still as Breakfast Club-y as ever, and the Cure/Smiths references are still very much intact, but this is no hollow pastiche. At some point, people got over the fact that m83’s Anthony Gonzalez loved John Hughes movies, and just started appreciating his starry-eyed, earnest celebration of that moment for what it was: fucking brilliant. And I feel like people should/are going to start doing the same for Wild Nothing. We may have heard this sound before, but we’ve never heard this voice before. Now that Tatum seems to have truly found his, it’s up to all of us to sit up and pay attention.
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Check out Nocturne‘s first single, “Shadow.”
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