Streaking in Tongues release Live from Lockdown

Streaking in Tongues have been steadily building up quite the reputation in the American underground over the last few years, and if you give their latest LP Live from Lockdown a listen over the late summer season, I think you’re going to understand why. In thirteen of their best songs, Streaking in Tongues explore the depth of their own artistry whilst staying away from the very notion of recycling elements of their past recordings for the purposes of this new live piece. A love letter to the avant-garde community that’s been punctuated with enough of an alternative folk bend to qualify for some serious college radio play over the next few months, Live from Lockdown is a treasure chest of tonality and textures the same.

The sublime melodicism of “Farewell OCD (You Pesky Bastard),”  “Little Big Questions,” “See Me See Me” and “Everyone Who Ever Cared” is countered with a rich grittiness in “Field of Pineapples,” “When It Comes to Dreaming” and “Boy in a Garbage Bag” that yields an even greater emotionality than words could have accounted for on their own. Though there are instances of conservatism on the part of our players here, most of the content in Live from Lockdown aches with a free-spirited attitude that has been missing from the majority of new indie records I’ve listened to lately. Streaking in Tongues are cutting loose in this record, and yet they sound even more focused than one might anticipate they would.

I love the streamlined mixing technique that was employed for Live from Lockdown, and while it’s a step away from what this act has done before, I don’t think it represents any sort of selling-out at all whatsoever. There’s too much heart in the delivery of “Kindergarten Prayer #2,” “Young Again,” “I Was a Fool Before You Were Born” and “Little Big Questions” for anything else to be the case, and even if this is your first time listening to Streaking in Tongues, I don’t think you’re going to have a hard time picking up on their authenticity. We’re listening to familial creativity in the most literal sense possible, and for my money, it’s producing what could be one of the best records of its kind to arrive this year.

Fans of Streaking in Tongues both old and new alike are going to love this vulnerable look they’re displaying in Live from Lockdown, but more pressingly, I think this thirteen-song set can serve listeners quite well in these trying times we’re living in today. There’s definitely an underlying theme to this record, from the choice of the tracklist to the tone in which each of the songs is offered up to us, and in perspective, it’s lining up perfectly with what everyone has been going through in some capacity or another. Streaking in Tongues aren’t asking a lot out of the audience in exchange for their most direct performance to make it onto an LP so far, and if you haven’t already, I’d give it a close examination this August.

Samuel Pratt