Tunnels is Nick Bindeman of Jackie-O Motherfucker and Eternal Tapestry. I’ve read before that this is his dance project, but it seems pretty entrenched in the psych mess of his other bands. Sure the tempo is a little bit higher, but there are a whole lot of guitar solos and maracas. Maybe I’m feeling mislead due to bad information, I guess I was expecting something different. But the tape starts with sort of what you would expect from a psych heavyweight. And I mean that in a good way. There’s some excellent guitar work, even nice acoustic numbers that are bolstered by some thumb piano and lots of jammy percussion. But then there’s some synth heavy drone stuff that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Expo ’70 album. Follow that up with some dirgy Boris/Melvins kind of awesomeness. And Side one is finished out with a stoney Sabbath groove proving that all guitarists are in fact metalheads.

Side two starts with acoustic guitars playing over a white noise wall. It’s kind of hard to make your ears settle to focus on one guitar sound or the other. Even more psychedelic stuff, even bordering on Skaters-type territory.

It appears this is all Bindeman on all the instruments and that makes a pretty cohesive effort even if track by track, it’s stylistically all over the place. The style change could read on paper like “Nick Bindeman plays the K-Tel Hits of the Underground 2009!” but that’s not the case. This is clearly a dude with a lot of interests in performing other kinds of music outside of his two most popular outfits. But because of the changes, and some of them are pretty drastic from song to song, it’s hard to get into a groove.
6/10 -- Andrew Murdock Livingston (2 September, 2009)