It’s fantastic to hear again from tweed & hyenas, the South East London project whose 2016 album Yates was among my favorites from that year. The band’s melding of folk, rock, soul, and jazz rewarded listeners through that release, and the enjoyment continues on new track “sona.” Mellow guitar tugs lead to gentle vocals just prior to the one-minute mark, with jazzy guitar flourishes thereafter. Dual-vocal effervescence at 01:34 provides a melodically resonating success, serving up a delectable hook.
This splendid track and its forthcoming album are elaborated upon by the band below:
“The track, sona, is one of sixteen. All the songs are anchored to sixteen ideograms that make out the cover for the album.* The music is, without degrading it, an afterthought that inscribes meaning and sound to the otherwise asemic (has no specific semantic content) signs. The result is an album featuring a mixture of eight short tracks that have a felt incompleteness, but promising potential, and an additional eight compositions that feel more full-fledged and finished. One is minimalist, the other is maximalist. The track order has been set up to pendulate between these two modes of songwriting. The ideograms or signs themselves allow for a sort of literary world-making, where the single, sona, is about sculptor Ruth Asawa and artist Henrik Drescher.”
