(3/6/5) 024: Tenci - Bubblegum
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Where so many songwriters pluck a narrative from small moments in a day that reminds them that the world can be a beautiful place, Tenci's Jess Shoman comes from a whole other place to, eventually, find their way back to the same conclusion.
At the start of their brand new single, Shoman returns to her car to find someone has stuck down her wiper with a piece of bubblegum, a completely pointless act of disruption that can still derail a day. “Bubblegum ponders the cruelty of the world, life and death in relation to the ever-changing inner spirit, and how feeling uninspired can feel like your soul is fading. This all stemmed from discovering that someone stuck gum on my windshield wiper."
Introduced with playful percussion, gorgeous horns, and Shoman's bubbling voice which remains a thing of skewed wonder. "Bubble gum stuck on my windshield. My mind is quiet, this world is cruel," she sings, before spiralling down into introspection, looking for meaning among malaise:
Finally picked up my guitar
Music can hurt to listen to
How do I focus more on living
Time slowly melting away
My container gardens dying
All I want is to be new
'Bubblegum' is the first new material from Tenci since 2022's astonishingly good A Swollen River, A Well Overflowing LP, which arrived, as this does, via the ever-excellent Keeled Scales label. A untamed three-and-a-half minutes, the new track carries that same absorbing mixture of quiet longing and swollen, pent-up rage - a emotive surge that all comes to a head in the second-half of the song; Shoman's growl a thing of suppressed, tempered passion as the surrounding space is filled by a cacophony of noise and exhalation.
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