TIRES
Handing Off The Egg
tires.bandcamp.com
One of my dream jobs is to be a music supervisor. These are the people behind the scenes of television and film who pick the music used — the people who are able to set the tone or deepen the emotion of a scene with the choice of the perfect music.
Handing Off The Egg, the latest EP from TIRES, represents a developing and distilling of the Des Moines band’s sound. The washes of synths added seem trendy and hip in light of the current fascination with ’80s music — and the songs beg to be used as soundtracks.
The opening song, “Hatchback,” opens with about a minute of a mood-setting loop backing a lone electric piano sound. It pauses, then bursts into a big, victorious, arm-waving movement with big, clean guitar tone. This track would be perfect for the resolution scene at the end of a movie about a love triangle where the common love interest finally makes their choice — think Pretty In Pink at the prom, where Duckie tells Andie it’s OK to abandon him, and she runs out to give Blane a big smooch.
Track two, “CIS,” has an ominous tone with a sequenced vibe that suggests technology. The sawtooth guitar runs and the analog synth solo at three minutes in sound like the perfect opening theme to one of those futuristic ’80s shows that always seemed to center on a technologically advanced vehicle: AirWolf, Blue Thunder or (God forbid) the motorcycles in Megaforce. It could also be used for a hard-boiled detective film set in the near future where the sidekick is a robot dog. It evokes shots of a detective sliding across the hood of a car, gun pointed in the air TJ Hooker style.
Handing Off The Egg wraps up, perhaps appropriately, with the more mellow and moody “Samsara.” The sparkling piano runs in it suggest a romantic montage scene, but one with a note of melancholy — maybe like the one in Top Gun where the flight instructor Charlie finally professes her love to Maverick, colored by the loss Maverick feels for his sidekick, Goose. Ultimately, it teases a bigger story that we want to know more about.
When I told TIRES’ Phil Young my thoughts on the songs, he laughed and thanked me for the video ideas. I hope he does make those videos. And if anyone wants to hire me as their music supervisor, they can reach me via Little Village.
This article was originally published in Little Village issue 247.
