Tinpan Orange – Love Is A Dog

Love Is A Dog will be the fifth studio album from Melbourne folksters Tinpan Orange. The trio, made up of siblings Emily and Jesse Lubitz with Alex Burkoy, are once again joined by the Cat Empire’s Harry James Angus on the production side of the record, which was put together at Type Foundry Studios in Portland, Oregon.

It is an album that explores the intricacies of love, but thanks to the largely acoustic nature of the instrumentation and sound, it is imbued with a certain honesty and believability that is often lost in pop music exploring themes such as love and loss.

Although Tinpan Orange are often shoehorned into the indie-folk genre, it would be truly unjust to consider Love Is A Dog simply a folk album. The piercingly beautifully melodic qualities of lead singer Emily Lubitz’s voice is transferred into an assortment of song types, from pulsating acoustic jams to brooding and gentler melodies, Lubitz remains an essential centrepiece around which the rest of the music is built on this record.

The lead single off the album Rich Man was released earlier this year, and gave audiences a small taste of the organic and truthful arrangements that the full LP is bursting with. The minimalistic use of acoustic guitar, piano, and strings create a soft, light textural accompanying layer that allows Emily to penetrate and dominate with her permeating and intensely emotive vocals. Her voice carries itself with so much passion that there is rarely need for any echoic production effects.

The third single Love Is A Dog is testament to the strength with which Emily’s vocals can carry a whole tune, and is one example of the gorgeous manner in which Jesse’s harmonising backings add another dimension to the sound in a way not dissimilar to methods employed by Angus & Julia Stone. Rich Man, Ordinary Lives and the key-modulating Light Across The Water are two other tracks that employ similar harmonising from the siblings.

The third band member Alex Burkoy, is no less talented than the other two, with his exquisite violin skill featured on the layer-building Leopards, and extensively on various other tracks including Cabarita and Rich Man. The addition of another melodic instrument inhabiting a similar range of pitch as the female vocals allows for countermelodies, and question and answer phrases to create new depth and aspect to the already rich melodic instrumental layer.

Love Is A Dog contains almost nothing worth of criticism, other than perhaps a general vibe of sameness across most of its tracks. The production across the whole album is brilliant, but there is no real sense of adventure particularly in what ends up being an over-reliance on Lubitz’s vocals.

Tinpan Orange use a formula for this LP that is perhaps, as a consequence of its unerring ability to play on the heartstrings of the listener, is rarely strayed from. The result is an emotive, well-executed record, but a safe one.

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‘Love Is A Dog’ is out April 8th, grab a copy here.