While live reviews have so far been less than complimentary about Tiger Mendoza, their strength lies in their recorded output, where the musical mush that their big industrial sound can become can be separated out and vocals can be tuned in more finely. This debut album from the band, formed around multi-instrumentalist and producer Ian De Quadros, is a sometimes punishingly solid offering, if occasionally suffering from the feeling it might have been more at home in the mid-1990s, pitched as it is somewhere between Nine Inch Nails’ gothic malevolence and Tricky’s bleak trip-hop.
Opening with the brutish machine beats and stuttering electronics of ‘Kalimba’, Tiger Mendoza’s mission seems to be to bulldoze any doubts the listener might have into a giant black hole, grinding hypnotically as Helena Markou croons in detached, ghostly style. The thought that this would make great incidental music to The Matrix is confirmed by ‘D Song’, with its glitchy, whirring factory ambience, although De Quadros’ vocals sound a little weak, if not incongruous after Markou’s siren-like performance beforehand.
A strength of this album is Tiger Mendoza’s willingness to take detours, like the disjointed scattergun drum and bass of ‘My House’, with its wide-eyed, haunted vocals, and in particular ‘Don’t Hate Me’, a punked-up electroclash piece that features Smilex singer Lee Christian growling tigerishly, the song recalling lost synth-punks Test-Icicles or Selfish Cunt.
Perhaps predictably the album loses its way just past the halfway mark. ‘The Circus’ is a mish-mash of tinny electro beats and wandering guitar, the vocals reduced to little more than a barely-decipherable mumble, while ‘Two Rings’ falls into so many post-Streets cliché pitfalls it’s a wonder it doesn’t finish the song with a broken hip.
Just as you conclude Tiger Mendoza have run out of steam on ‘Last Train To Chiba’, Markou sounding lost where previously she’d sounded menacing, they hit back, the huge wall of sound that heralds ‘Dark Maybe Darker’ hinting towards Ebsen & The Witch’s gothic tribalism, the guitar a searing shoegaze glissando, while album closer ‘Mellotron’, while dreamier, is darker still, reminiscent of Zola Jesus’ subterranean blues and finishing the album on a high (or a low, whichever way you look at it).
On a balance a very respectable debut offering, then, but, like so many (relatively) new bands, you feel maybe Tiger Mendoza would have been better releasing an EP rather than a full album – something to better demonstrate their strengths, without simultaneously exposing their weak points.