Tab & Anitek — Chasing Rabbits (2009)
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Chasing Rabbits has been released by Tab & Anitek in 2009. Almost two decades later, it remains one of my all-time favourite albums. What keeps Chasing Rabbits alive for me are the lyrics, themes, and mood of this joint-effort album.
First let me show you two songs from Woods of Ypres, a Canadian doom metal band: Wet Leather and Dirty Window of Opportunity. The songs cannot be chill trip-hop, they are doom metal dealing with depression, abandonment, and an acute shortage of hope. Why would they be in any way related to the album this post is talking about?
Because Chasing Rabbits featurs tracks such as Here Comes the Rain, Charades, Last Call, Manipulated Living and, crème de la crème of the album, Ballad of the Mann that Never Made It.
The lyrics to all of these would fit perfectly on a doom metal record. The music, similarly, is not light and relaxed, but slow, heavy, and evoking the image of a film-noir dive bar, with down-and-out people sitting inside half-obscured by thick lingering fog of cigarette smoke and the atmosphere of broken dreams.
If this is trip-hop, it must have been a pretty bad trip.
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