After a three-year drought, Tamino floods his musical landscape with a wistful fusion of love, longing and loss in his third album, Every Dawn’s a Mountain, released on March 21st. In his most unembellished but enigmatic lyricism yet, Tamino reflects mournfully on the past and faces the contradiction of challenge and opportunity brought anew by each day. Solidifying his trademark blend of Eastern and Western musical qualities and intense, virtuosic vocal range, Every Dawn’s A
Mountain is the natural maturation of Tamino’s previous work.
Throughout the record’s 10 tracks, the dramatic flair and haunting symphonies that permeated Tamino’s debut album, Amir, are intertwined with the subtle, contemplative lyrics and gentle, stripped-back instrumentals that he developed in its successor, Sahar. The overall effect is an album that beautifully fluctuates between tracks that entertain soft, slow rhythms and ones that develop a dynamic intensity. The album begins with “My Heroine”, a yearnful exploration of obsessive and
redemptory love that complements a gentle, minimal instrumental with Tamino’s soul stirring vocals that reflect the longing and desperation held within the lyrics. He follows this with the five-minute odyssey of a song, “Babylon”, which steadily builds up to a soaring falsetto that strengthens his lyrical metaphor of the titular decaying city. Its arguably one of the album’s strongest tracks, equal to the
striking theatricality of his earlier songs, like “Habibi”.
In many songs on the album, Tamino imbues a palpable sense of sorrow that is veiled by an ethereal melody or elegant arpeggio. Yet alongside side this ostensible melancholy, lives an equal feeling of hope; an audible embodiment of the sun breaking through dark clouds on a stormy day. Admist the gentle, angelic guitar of the title track, “Every Dawn’s a Mountain”, he challenges the woe of longing
with a subtle acknowledgement that each day is a new opportunity. In “Sanpaku”, the rhythm notably increases, disguising some of the album’s more vulnerable but allusive lyricism, contemplating the fated tragedy of an individual with such sanpaku eyes, like himself. Transferring from one strong instrumental to another, the melody of “Sanctuary”, which notably features Mitski, is deceptively uplifting. Emotions of intense yearning are further shrouded in metaphor and the soft, heavenly blend of singing hides the pensive affliction that is poetically expressed in the song.
The second half of the album is markedly more relaxed and carries a moodier tone. Inspired by the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, “Raven” is Tamino’s answer to the gothic; crescendos of various instruments accompany the haunting ascension of his voice that simulate a hypnotic draw towards the darkness. The following tracks such as “Willow” and “Dissolve” instead embody a more hollow, sombre ambience, owing to how bare their instrumentals are in comparison. This emptiness intensifies the sense of desolation in Tamino’s words as he further suffuses his lyrics with stark
sorrowful imagery. He remedies his anguish with a subtle hopefulness in “Elegy”, an initially unassuming track that blossoms instrumentally, vocally and lyrically upon each listen, and is possibly one of the most heavenly songs on the album.
Tamino ends his musical exploration of loss and desire with the explicitly autobiographical “Amsterdam” that encapsulates the bittersweet nostalgia of a timeless summer’s day. The song creates a relaxed, yet poignant, finish and is an effective culmination of each emotional direction traversed throughout the album. As April heralds its poetical mixture of memory and desire, the release of Every Dawn’s a Mountain perfectly accompanies the arrival of spring with its faint hopefulness of the future underlying an intense longing for the past.
“Tamino (Waves Vienna 2018) (DSC02538)” by Simon Legner (User:simon04) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.