With every song exhaling like a weary and familiar sigh, David Tapley’s alt-country, Dublin-based act Tandem Felix summons the peaks and troughs of everyday life, where hope is lost just as quickly as it is found.
Sung like a man who always seems to discover a hole in his shoe the day it rains the most, Tapley is our underdog who, over Americana slides, soft drums and bending strings, sells his soul in order to survive three evenings in (or outside) a night club on the Nightclub (I Sold My Soul to the Devil).
Oil Money, triumphant in dread and self-delusion, is a moral lesson in how wealth can have us so blindsided that we can trade in everything, including friends and happiness, for it.
Sunny music for clouded heads, the dusty Over Yonder questions the worth we put on other people’s perspectives and, in a post-nuclear setting on Bravo Maestro, even though he’s wasting away as the world implodes, our downhearted protagonist succeeds in rhyming drunker with bunker.
Drôle and dour, Tapley’s wit and melodies capture our lowest moments and remind us that if you’re not already crying, you may as well laugh.
