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  • Streaming + Download

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    The vinyl is actually a very good sound quality pressing in an immaculate sleeve but just has some clicks, some scuffing and a slight warp. One test case person fed back that its "A decent pressing, and a great album."

    Sleeve and lyric sheet signed by Nathan Hall.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Tunguska Tydfil via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Full Digital Discography

    Get all 34 Nathan Hall and the Sinister Locals and Soft Hearted Scientists releases available on Bandcamp and save 80%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Phantom of Canton Halloween Demoz E.P., Waltz of the Weekend, Night of the Gorgon E.P., Golden Fleece, California Time Machine E.P., The Kraken of Roath Park Lake, Stand and Deliver/Pointing Paw, Sasquatch!/Tarantula!, and 26 more. , and , .

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  • Limited edition compact disc
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    A 16 song compact disc in a card wallet signed by Nathan Hall

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  • Limited edition set of 5!!!!
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Signed Tunguska Tydfil vinyl and CD plus 2 radio promotional CDs plus CD of unreleased works in progress that may appear on future albums.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Tunguska Tydfil via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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  • Tunguska Tydfil with limited edition bonus CD
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    The extra CD feature home recorded songs and sketches that may feature on future official releases.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Tunguska Tydfil via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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about

It is a very eclectic album that has influences as disparate as the incidental music to 1960s TV series “Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)”, “Red River Rock” by Johnny and the Hurricanes, Ghost folk, Early post Syd Pink Floyd, the manic harpsichord flourishes of “Da Capo” era Love, deranged Circus music, Ghost town pianos, Spoken Word sound collages, Procul Harum, and it has a broken hearted haunted torch song at the end called “Even this city won't last”.

A VERY POSITIVE AND PERCEPTIVE REVIEW OF "TUNGUSKA TYDFIL" FROM MARK BARTON
Listening first time through to ‘Tunguska Tydfil’, the second opus from Nathan Hall and the Sinister Locals, during what’s given to be an extended sabbatical from Soft Hearted Scientists, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was disconnected, without fluency or flow.

Takes a while to realise these aural portraits are refracted memories, much like stills in a jumbled less ordered photograph album spiralling backwards and forwards through the ages.

It’s this somewhat scattered crookedness that serves as part of the albums charm, one minute you're reclining in a wistful wonderland fogbound by an autumnal haziness (as on the title track whereby seasoned in a lolloping waywardness that checks his former charges, a spectral resonance worthy of Nick Nicely albeit as though resulting from a long hazy night of good cheer and over generous scoops of wine with the Beta Band strays and stirs with peculiar oddness all the time quaintly doffing a cap to a ‘mother’s daughter and other songs’ era Tunng) the next seafaring dreamily to the mystical lair of Monsterism Island sharing watchman duties with the Beach Boys and the Superimposers (as hinted ‘sometimes I see you’).

Unmistakably awash with the Hall DNA, ‘Tunguska Tydfil’ is peppered with familiar eccentric haunts, at once traced in fading nostalgia yet seductively spirited for the best part in a becoming baroque bucolic that hints of a kinship with a youthful Oddfellows Casino...whilst the gallant, swash buckling harrumph of ‘glacial glare’ heavily hints of snatched moments listening intently to platters bearing the name of former Cardiacs’ man William D Drake.

For us, on a purely personal note, we have something of a fondness for both ‘carnival of the damned’ and ‘song of a sourpuss’, the former an away day freak circus gathering oozed in spell charming pastorals and all manner of ne-er do welling souls gathered in a darkly mystical celebration with the latter a hypnotic rustic tethering, softly flashed in an alluring kaleidescopia of drifting and dissolving psychedelic hazes – gigglegoo’ by Freed Unit anyone?

All said best moment by a furrow or two and a winding country lane, ‘The Phoenix of Albany Road’ arrives set in seductive sprays of baroque heraldry and a peppering of pristinely airy posies which combine gently to craft a disarming idyll that recalls the late Greg Lake.

Just while you think you’ve mastered all the albums secret path ways, cul de sacs and hidden hidey holes, it goes and drops a parting surprise with the farewell wave of the quite frankly masterful ‘even this city won’t last’. Never before and never will you again, I strongly suspect, hear Hall so openly vulnerable, intimate, reflective and sighed with a forlorn tear streaked crush.


A GREAT REVIEW FROM TERRASCOPE AUGUST 2018
NATHAN HALL and the SINISTER LOCALS – TUNGUSKA TYDFIL
(LP/CD from Bandcamp)

While Soft Hearted Scientists are seemingly still on a hiatus, Nathan Hall marks time with a follow-up release to The Sinister Locals’ debut from last year, the mostly delightful Effigies.

Like its predecessor there are similarities to the distinctive sound of SHS – unsurprisingly given that Hall is principal songwriter for both bands, although perhaps there is a little more semblance of clear daylight between the two here.

It’s a warm and homely collections of tunes recorded at the band’s “The Sinister House” in Cardiff and on which disparateness abounds, from an adaptation of ‘Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)’ (which got me checking out You Tube and reliving an important part of my pre-pubescent TV viewing), to the disarmingly sunny ‘Sometimes I See You’. There are lavish splashes of Love dotted throughout, and not just in the harpsichord but the guitar phrasings too. And there are mellotrons, or what sound like them, and I’m nothing if not a sucker for those.

Cope-style keyboard runs pepper the tantalising vignette ‘Lock In At The Last Chance Saloon’ while a sitar-like drone underscores ‘Song Of A Sourpuss’ (you see, the titles aren’t half bad either). The mostly languid and innocent sounding set list occasionally veers into the genuinely sinister, for example on the Bolero-style ‘Carnival Of The Damned’ which nudges into darkly burlesque Tiger Lillies territory.

This is a wonderful summer camp diversion from all the nastiness out there in goblin wood. Embrace this.


INTERESTING WORDS ABOUT NEW ALBUM TUNGUSKA TYDFIL FROM MIND DECODER. DEFINITELY AN OLD FASHIONED ALBUM OF ALBUM TRACKS (NOT SINGLES THAT GRAB YOU BY THE SCRUFF OF THE NECK) THAT ARE GROWERS AND CREEP INTO YOUR BRAIN IF LISTENED TO AS A WHOLE A FEW TIMES AND IN SEQUENCE. WHICH I APPRECIATE IS A BIG ASK WITH 10 TRILLION SONGS OUT THERE.

"The Phoenix of Albany Road" is another gorgeous track from Nathan Hall’s TUNGUSKA TYDFIL, an album awash with a gentle psychedelic numinosity. The baroque flourishes at the heart of The Phoenix Of Albany Road have something of George Harrison’s Piggies about them, but the wistful, bucolic charm of this track replaces the misanthropy at the heart of that song with a sweet sense of yearning for something not entirely lost. In many ways, this is the essence of TUNGUSKA TYDFIL – the album is imbued with a poignant sense of nostalgia; sometimes rueful, sometimes celebratory, almost hauntological in fact; the lyrics reflecting fractured memories offset by exquisite instrumentation and playful melodies. I didn’t quite get this album when I first heard it – I felt it lacked an underlying cohesiveness – but repeated listens reveal an album very much at home with itself and one of my favourite releases of the year.


REVIEW IN PENNYBLACKMUSIC BY KEITH HOW
The ever prolific Nathan Hall (Soft Hearted Scientists) returns with another trip into his world of wonders. 2017’s 'Effigies' offering was something of an underground classic, and was full of strange and peculiar tunes all wrapped up in a rather exotic blanket of joyous psychedelia. With Nathan Hall there is always something else going on beneath the surface. A strange fascination with a world that perhaps he feels he doesn’t belong in or he finds it hard to make sense of. He is singing our song for sure.

'Tunguska Tydfil' only compounds the suspicions of Barrett-esque weirdness interlocked with flourishes of genius. Opening with three short instrumentals one could be forgiven for being slightly unsettled but Hall is soon into his stride, mining that psychedelic groove that takes you away into another dimension. 'Rocky Roads', for example, is twenty-two seconds long, leading into the beautiful Beach Boys-influenced 'Sometimes I See You' but, with an album that opens with an instrumental 'Randall and Hopkirk Revisited', nothing should surprise us.

All of Hall’s trademark gifts are on show - his ringing guitar work, glorious harmony vocals and inventive catchy tunes that get in your ears. As with 'Effigies', it is hard to walk away from this album once you have started to listen. There are seventeen tracks in all, mostly around the two minute mark, each one a vignette that makes you wonder just what Nathan Hall might do given a load of cash and studio time. Check out the wondrous 'Phoenix of Albany Square', haunting chamber pop at its finest and the prophetic 'Even This City Won't Last' tinged with sadness and a nod towards Procul Harum.

'Tunguska Tydfil' then is another Pandora’s box of magic and mystery from one of the unsung heroes of our times and well worth thity minutes of your time.


GREAT REVIEW FOR TUNGUSKA TYDFIL FROM BLISS/AQUAMARINE

NATHAN HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS Tunguska Tydfil CD/LP (The Hip Replacement)
Second album from Soft Hearted Scientists' Nathan Hall's current band. Here Nathan and co have opted for an understated homemade approach, with most songs under the three minute mark. Randall and Hopkirk Revisited pairs the baroque with the retro-futuristic. Windmills on Fire is a swirly organ-led psych-pop instrumental. Tunguska Tydfil is woozy, dreamy psych-folk with surreal poetic lyrics and sprinklings of atmospheric electronics. Glacial Glare is uplifting quirky psych-pop with whirling organ and soaring woodwind. Side By Side (Glowing Guide) is very beautiful laid-back psych-pop with intriguing lyrics that seem to be about being protected by a spirit guide. Carnival of the Damned is an eccentrically gruesome story of a circus from hell, with its cannibal clowns, evil ringmaster and death-foreseeing fortune teller, set to a warped psychedelic mutation of Spanish folk music peppered with manic and unsettling electronic burblings. The Phoenix of Albany Road is very lovely baroque-psych-folk-pop, richly arranged with harpsichord and strings. Even this City Won't Last is a bleak, wistful number set to a stark piano and organ arrangement. Another winner from this talented, free-thinking songwriter.

ASTRAL ZONE REVIEW AUGUST 2014

Here we have 16 short and simple songs with usually quite minimal arrangements and instrumentation. As with the Scientists, the main genius of the music is just that: how can something so simple and innocent sound so great and captivating? More is definitely not always more.

The overall vibe is sort of melancholic and nostalgic, but in a tasty, interesting way. There are wonderful, emotional baroque pop psych numbers, more folky things and some weirder, experimental moments to be found.

One of my favourites is the beautiful and melodic "Side By Side (Glowing Guide)" that is also the album's longest piece at 4:29. Another longer piece is the weird, hypnotic and dark "Carnival of the Damned" that has cool Mellotron and spacey sound effects along with the vocals, percussion, piano, acoustic guitar etc.

There are also some primitive electronic beat on the very 80s sounding "St Davids Bed And Breakfast Blackout Disaster" that brings to mind Nathan's FdM label mate Nick Nicely.

"Song of a Sourpuss" is closer to late 60s / early 70s U.K acid folk. Marvellous.

All in all, this is another amazing collection of little, shiny sonic diamonds that deserve to be heard by all psych and folk pop appreciating ears. The album is at the moment available on CD and digital, but a limited vinyl release is imminent as well.

credits

released June 18, 2018

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Nathan Hall and the Sinister Locals and Soft Hearted Scientists Cardiff, UK

The music mixes psychedelia with baroque touches, and analogue electronics and seeks to create the same confusion of the senses that a prime Beach Boys track does. Is it summer or is it Christmas? Neither. Its both simultaneously. The lyrics walk the dark side of Sunny Psychedelia Street and know that all is not well with the world. Burning effigies and suicidal Ice Road Truckers all feature. ... more

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