Don't Take My Life Away

Tune Yards - Bizness (free download)


Listen as Merrill Garbus adds the layers: a vocal dripping like melting ice, a harmonizing vocal, drums, drumsticks. Tune Yards played this at Summerstage last year, and her voice looked the way it sounds; pushed to its limit her head turns at an angle and toes the line between yelling and singing. The chorus adds economical guitar upstrokes, and other embellishments of this kind expose the structure of the song, so that when she gets into the later choruses there's an entire horn section behind her. In that way the song builds and builds, like a controlled crescendo of euphoria. She toys with your emotion as it rises, pauses, and drops back in.

w h o k i l l is out April 19th on 4AD. Tune Yards plays Minneapolis 5/8 and Brooklyn 5/21. Check out her first album, Bird-Brains.