Review: Tiger & Woods – On The Green Again
Tiger and Woods’ camped up boogie style is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the more plastic side of dance floor melodrama. The Italian pair’s pristine, groove orientated sound has more than a little nip’n’tuck to it, their work is a pouting, pumped-up mix of style and substance with an overriding and at times irresistible functionality.
Releases since their 2011 debut album have been sparse but lapped up by DJs from high street to club. Meanwhile the Italian duo have become a staple of the festival circuit, cleaning up in the edit sub-genre and cornering the scene with their edit-not so-edit style. Their sophomore LP, On The Green Again, released through their own eponymous label expands on their tried and tested routine, working choice samples fluidly into reverential yet original sounds.
Setting themselves apart from the usual edit fare, the pair craft tracks in the traditional remix fashion – reimagining a sample or a whole tune rather than simply dropping a more floor friendly rearrangement. By that nature there is bunkers of nostalgia here both for the 80s and 90s sounds that drive the tracks and perversely – given the 5-year gap between albums – a pang for the good ol’ days of Nu Disco that heralded the duo’s arrival.
It is good to see them rolling with the golf metaphor and the music fits snuggly with the mantra. Think perfectly manicured grass matching crisp, clinical beats and smooth, evenly rolling hills recalling the undulations of tracks expertly programmed for maximum dancefloor efficiency. If the first album, Onto The Green was more about achieving clinical greatness over 18 holes, this second effort is more akin to a visit to the club’s adjoining fitness centre to hone in on core strength and flexibility.
Reigning their sound in for the album format has meant the individual tracks’ raw functionality as dance floor weapons wain slightly but this is substituted by expanding on their punchy sound to exploring the essence of the era they call on for samples. The dance floor muscle is toned and teased away from tracky structures, leaving more song based arrangements but without losing the functional fluidity and chug that defines them. The result is an LP as lean as an aerobics instructor and just as bouncy.
On The Green Again starts with a kitsch beat-less intro, leaving the listener under no illusions about what’s to follow. First track RockMeLoveMe is straight in with a meaty kick drum, revving things up with their trademark bassline squelch and vocal snippets. It could have been picked from anywhere in the T&W back catalogue but it segues so smoothly that before you know it you’re flexing along with the cowbells.
Set free from the dancefloor confines, the Italians can realign their form for home listening. For example where an extended build may have proceeded a drop it is now used to bind tracks together and let the LP flow smoothly. Bestissmimo conveyors in and out with barely a footnote but for the inclusion of a few horns, before the duo ramp things up with Ginger & Fred, which is all pumped up disco drama, swinging along with its stabby vocals and ascending keys.
Vogue fests Phoenix and Come And Get My Loving lead into the romantic Italo of Endless Affair. Sounding like a melancholy Moroder at an arcade it shows a more introspective side of the artists and adds depth to the long player while keeping it pruning in the mirrors. Radio Tiger is back for more reps, lunging and crunching, while the provocatively titled Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden is a more gnarly affair and brings the LP into a spaced out cool down, perhaps hinting at future musical directions for the pair.
Through strong arrangements and solid programming, On The Green Again is a vehicle for reverential music that manages to pour in enough of the artist’s own ideas to detach itself from the era it holds so highly, allowing it to exist in its own right as credible, fun-times music. The sound hasn’t moved on a great deal but they do manage to distil it admirably into an album that turns out to be a tight listen from start to finish.
The pace of the LP shows how far the pair have come, in the way techno hints to an imagined future, T&W nod to an imagined past. Maybe the reimagining of the past is where the artistic merit of On The Green Again lies and contributes to the endearing appeal of the Italian twosome away from purely functional club music.
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