Single of the week: Phillip Jon Taylor ft. Tendertwin – Rear Window review

By Phil Scarisbrick

One man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure,’ so the proverb says. While he may not have considered what he had ‘rubbish’, when PAWS’ man, Phillip Jon Taylor, decided to discard the chunks of a song he was working on that he wasn’t happy with, he passed what remained on to singer/songwriter, Bilge Nur Yilmaz AKA Tendertwin. Giving her a free reign to do with it what she wanted, the results ended up being new single, Rear Window.

Written in honour of the friends Taylor made on the road, but has been unable to see due to the cessation of – or at least lack of – touring, the song in particular references an Austin, TX-based friend and film buff. The track itself sounds like the band who made The National’s Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers had written Oblivions from their most recent offering, I Am Easy To Find. The instrumentation is a quite simple in its arrangement, with no need for the bells and whistles of strings/horns to create the epic crescendo we experience on the Yilmaz-led chorus, as she sings ‘How is this felt, misunderstood / Water seeps straight into my boots / My heart sinks right between the two / City lights: red, yellow and blue.

The dynamic of the pair sounds like a conversation rather than two people in complete sync – with Taylor looking back while Yilmaz seems rooted firmly in the present. The Hitchcockian references of the closing verse paired with the visceral imagery of the chorus, driven by a brilliantly-diverse drum pattern, are completely captivating. What may have ended up being an offcut thrown on the sonic scrapheap now exists as this great single.

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