Tender Age

"...Portland outfit Tender Age have released a handful of noise infused singles indebted to the halcyon days of Creation Records over the past couple of years. With a sound that veers somewhere between Slowdive's ambient soundscapes and the full throttle attack of the early Boo Radleys or Telescopes, they're a name to watch out for in the future. New EP Disappear Here is out now on Sinis Recordings and well worth the measly sum of 8 US dollars, which works out at about £5.50..." - Drowned In Sound

The 1990s were a time in which different styles morphed and merged into music that was both edgy and oddly familiar, combing a style of jarring guitar, simple drumbeats and brooding lyrics. It’s a style that has helped deem the decade as being one of the best in music. This tradition is most recently shown in local band Tender Age’s, newest EP Disappear Here. The EP, a short-lived six songs, evokes a rhythmic shoegaze, noise-pop feel. The band is able to reconstruct the intense reverb-heavy and dissonant feedback that trended in the early-to-mid ’90s with bands like Sonic Youth, Primal Scream and Breeders.

The group’s dual female vocals arranged with layered guitars is reminiscent of bands like My Bloody Valentine. Each song is uniquely true to Portland’s music scene and is universally gratifying. From the get-go, with its tracks “Lowers” and “Delirium” the band shows their level of comfort with disintegration- like synth and metallic beats, and both are tied together with ethereal vocal styles.

The songs, though seemingly simple with their instruments — guitar, drums, bass, synths, vocals and more guitar — display a cohesion that bleeds together into a fervent trebly jangle. The EP is compelling and rides a wave of nostalgia with its fuzz guitar, simple melodies, augmented electronics and basic drum pulses.

Disappear Here is meant to be heard loud, because at any lower volume its vitality would be lost — and Tender Age is able to update the early rock riffs and distortion with an intensity that when cranked up to speaker-rattling levels has an infectious end result. » - Eleven PDX Magazine

Portland's Tender Age make bedroom pop, but the bedroom is windowless and lit by a single red bulb, with a portable TV glitching between fuzzy static and the nightly news. That's what their new EP, Disappear Here, sounds like, anyway—sweet, airy vocals suspended in a dreamlike state, waking suddenly to the TV's harsh, milky glare and droning background noise. These lacy melodies are veiled, but not unreachable within Tender Age's four walls of wailing, eerie guitar feedback. The unexpectedness of the group's soundbite interjections feels like you're dozing off during Cheers and waking up to 60 Minutes. Keep an eye out for Tender Age's debut full-length, tentatively scheduled for an August release on Sinis Recordings. CIARA DOLAN - The Portland Mercury (Entertainment Weekly)

As a follow-up to last year’s ultra ethereal 7” single, Get High/Always, this spring Tender Age unveiled their longest collection of recordings to date with the EP Disappear Here. Released on cassette and vinyl through SINIS Recordings, the short-run of limited edition vinyl have already sold out, however according to the label another edition is in the works.

Following some lineup changes nearly two years ago, Disappear Here feels like a commencement for Tender Age and who they are as a group, with a cohesion that feels like they’ve hit their stride. Compared to the band’s first release, 2014’s Anything Mirrors 7”, the new EP is aggressively more experimental. There is no shyness as they stray from dainty melodies and pretty guitar riffs. Disappear Here is about more than how things feel on the surface; it takes time to get know the sharp, dark twists in unraveling the band’s tight-knit barrage of heavy, shoegaze sounds with a nod to 90’s greats My Bloody Valentine and The Breeders.

With similarly lilting guitar tones and simple drum beat, the EP’s opener “Lowers” feels like a somber shift in a similar narrative to last year’s single “Get High,” albeit with an added noise/freakout breakdown. Immediately following, “Delirium” shocks the senses, driven by a synthetic, dark and frenetic rhythm, warbling guitar effects are used as a backdrop for the haunting vocals rather than creating a melodic framework. On the B side, Tender Age offer their own explorative, darkwave reinterpretations of the classic 60’s pop tunes “Dream Lover” by Bobby Darin and “I Love How You Love Me” by the Paris Sisters. The later track, in particular, taking the listener on a bizarre journey of sound that is both eerie and enticing, and just as much spoken-word as experimental noise.

See Them Live: Tender Age play at Holocene this Thursday night, May 26, with Tamaryn, and again next month on June 15 at the High Water Mark with Hollow Sunshine. - Noise and Color

Portland shoegazers Tender Age pay tribute to early Creation records alumni with their forthcoming 7inch ‘Get High / Always’ (available October 2 via Sinis Recordings). ‘Get High’ is a strong single that wears its influences on its sleeve, and there’s a kaleidoscopic video to match. If Tender Age’s 2014 double tracker ‘Anything / Mirrors‘ didn’t get your attention, I’m sure this will! The five piece (Tauna Leonardo, Bryan Robertson, Elaina Tardif, Nick Ferrucci and Christo­pher Klarer) are set to take their ear bleeding rock n’ roll on the road this month, check out the tour dates below. Their passion for 90s guitar bands is evident, and I think we’re all the better for it! Looking forward to the Tender Age full length, expected in 2016. - Sounds Better With Reverb

We published Part One of our interview with Portland, Oregon quintet Tender Age just as their EP Disappear Here was released digitally and on cassette. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to immerse myself the cassette edition. I found myself playing it twice a day or so for four or five weeks running, sometimes waking up with hooks or stray bits of sound echoing insistently in my mind, pressing me to play the tape again. I quite simply love the EP, which consists of gleefully, painfully torqued and deconstructed songs whose thoroughly appealing pop core nonetheless shiningly asserts itself amidst all the noise, distortion, and mercilessly wrenched arrangements. Given all the noise Tender Age has loaded into their pop, it’s remarkable that the pop is preserved. The band has struck a remarkable balance between pop savvy and inspired destructiveness.

Disappear Here builds on the girl-group-inflected dream pop of the band’s 2014 “Anything”/”Mirrors” 7-inch and the classic shoegaze of last fall’s “Get High”/”Always” 7-inch by additionally embracing a big wallop of Nineties noise-rock chaos. It's a fizzing, vertiginous blend that couldn’t be a better match for my own musical enthusiasms.

Sonic transitions of various kinds bridge the tracks so that each side of the cassette plays as a continuous stream of sound. Speech, most of it appropriated, is a prominent component of of the overall mixture. Threads of spoken word and snippets of prattle from film or broadcast media are woven into the background or come to the fore quite frequently. What’s surprising is how well this plays. At first I guessed that such a generous helping of this kind of material might start to wear thin with repeated listening. Rather, over time, the various strands of speech in the EP—at least for me—refresh themselves by seeming to yield different texts and new resonances. This morphing and deepening of meaning is enabled by the fact that the selections, while often playful and sardonic, also evoke inexhaustible themes like tragic loss and the deeper nature of the self. Even in protracted heavy rotation, Disappear Here continually reveals new facets and fresh pleasures.

The first side consists of three originals. We premiered the opening track, “Lowers”, in February here, and you can watch the brand-new video for it, put together by Tender Age guitarist Christopher Klarer, below. The title of the second track, “Delirium”, speaks rather well for itself. Side A’s closer, “No,” might be my favorite of the three originals. It’s a fractured waltz of disappointment and disaffection—Elaina Tardiff sings “Oh, I’m underwhelmed/The future should have been so much brighter and more fair/Oh, these days I walk around//Looking for my face in the window/Of this market price/apartment complex”—that offers a pleasing melody to sing along with over the sonic carnage. As much as the sonic vocabulary is one of contorted guitar screeches, bursts of tortured noise, and dark hazes of sound, the band still delivers on pop essentials like memorable lyrics, catchy choruses and melodious earworms.



Side B consists of three covers. The first is a stretched-out torquing of Bobby Darin’s originally snappy 1959 mega-hit “Dream Lover” (see Darin perform it live on TV here). Tender Age sets the song’s wistful romantic aspirations among twisted guitars and eerie background vocals. Next up is “I Love How You Love Me”, first released by the Paris Sisters as a 1961 single that gave seminal girl-group producer Phil Spector one of his earliest production hits. Tender Age gives the tenderly sentimental lyrics a somber, almost dirge-like dual recitation (the original also features a recited portion) by Tauna Leonardo and Elaina amongst spacey noises and washes of sonic abrasion until, as the track immolates itself, a slowed-down sample offers a taste of the original’s melody and arrangement.



As the embers die out, a lovely Enoesque ambient loop emerges. We may easily be expecting an ending to the EP any second here, but after more than two minutes of soft ambient unspooling comes a sixth, unlisted and unidentified track that doesn’t show up in the EP’s digital version. Out of respect for the mysteriousness around its appearance on the tape, I won’t identify this third cover. I will say that the song first appeared twenty years ago with an utterly Spectoresque girl group sound, and that on several levels its presence here deftly wraps together the Sixties and Nineties influences that Disappear Here celebrates and bends to its own purposes. And somehow, the basic charm of all three of the songs covered is still in evidence despite the frenzy of contortion and ironic ‘tude to which they’ve been subjected—no small achievement.

Tender Age is presently on tour. In the coming days and weeks they’ll be hitting seventeen Midwest and East Coast locations, followed by a homecoming show in Portland on September first. We posted the dates here. In conjunction with the tour, Sinis Recordings is releasing a very limited 12-inch vinyl edition of Disappear Here. It’s on clear vinyl and all the covers are screen printed by hand. Only a few copies of the 12-inch will be available at each tour stop; the same goes for a very limited cassette split with Portland allies Toxic Slime.

For those unable to make it to any of the tour dates, a very small number of the 12-inch discs will be made available on a first-come, first-serve basis this Friday, August 5th, at noon Pacific time. You’ll be able to buy it through this Sinis Recordings Bandcamp page, where the cassette and digital editions of Disappear Here are for sale on an ongoing basis.

Watch this space for Part 2 of our interview with Tender Age in the coming days. - When The Sun Hits

Portland dreamgaze-pop band Tender Age make pretty sounds perfect for fantasizing of mini umbrellas on tropical beaches. Tonight is the release party for the follow-up 7-inch—“Anything”/“Mirrors”—to last year's sun-hazed self-titled EP, out on new Portland-based label Track & Field Records. With kaleidoscopic whorls of glittering guitar feedback, atonal coos, and tambourine-filled backbeats, this young band should pique the interest of C86 jangle enthusiasts and fans of the Jesus and Mary Chain's less chainsawed moments. Evocative of peak-time Slowdive’s bliss-toned sprawl, Tender Age's sedated pop commands getting lost in. Very new local trio Celibacy Now's music doesn't have an internet presence yet, but they have already made quite an impression with their Manifesta, which asserts, among many things—"we are reclaiming celibacy—the state of being unmarried—as revolution," "we reject abuse in all its forms," and "we will not be silenced." Preach it! With A Weekend at the Feelies' downtempo bedroom pop. BRITTNIE FULLER - The Stranger (Seattle Entertainment Weekly)

"...Tender Age started out strong, immediately jumping into rhythmic, jamming set that evoked mental imagery of a more pastoral psychedelia–a fitting swift and strong introduction, considering they had rolled into town only an hour before their set due to van issues.

The dual female vocals and three different guitars evoked a hint of the Breeders; several instances in the third song of their set had a “Roi” feel to them. Their sound was intense, but not monolithic. Rather, it exhuded a more enveloping, pseudo ’50s surf rock meets metallic shoegaze feel. A killer rhythm section complimented the lazy Sunday slo-mo surf sound with a quick and tight energy; their drummer kept the energy up while the bass provided a gritty hook over the guitars. They made their versatility quite apparent, as about midway through their set they slowed down to a softer, ethereal ballad and their three guitars allowed for constant unique combinations. While Tender Age is definitely uniquely Portland, they still have a “keep it weird” universality, as fans of Austin’s Black Angels might also find a lighter home in Tender Age’s sound." - ovrld