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The thing about noisy D.C. indie-poppers Black Tambourine is that—-given that, you know, the band recorded very few songs around the early ’90s and all of them are great—-its fans will never be satisfied. The six previously unheard songs that the band released this January as part of a self-titled retrospective—-four new recordings, two demos—-grew its oeuvre by a kind of astounding 60 percent. They left me wanting more.
At the time, member Archie Moore teased that there was more to come—-specifically, a hissy cassette recording of four of the band’s songs, mixed at Inner Ear by Don Zientara. The master of the mixes was stolen out of car, and the band then quickly made new mixes of the songs for a single and compilation. Recently, Moore found a cassette dub of the Zientara mixes, and made a digital rip. You know these recordings already—-these are just different mixes.
They’re still very much worth your time: More so than the versions you can hear on Black Tambourine’s Complete Recordings or the self-titled comp, Zientara’s mix emphasizes power over pretty. “They’re hissy, and there’s a little bit of cassette wow and flutter, but you can still hear what made them interesting, so I figure some people might enjoy hearing them,” Moore told me in January.
Download the recordings at the Black Tambourine bandcamp page. Or listen after the jump: