Soft Tigers - Maria (Single)
» Young and Restless - Annandale Hotel, The, NSW - October 13, 2007
The first thing you’d probably notice about this single is that it’s vinyl and, no matter how hard you try, it won’t fit into your CD player. Don’t despair though; you can still hear it via the wonders of websites such as myspace. The single comes off Soft Tigers’ debut album, which is currently only available on cassette tape, displaying the band’s knack for reviving dying forms of music playback.
Usually relatively new bands such as Soft Tigers don’t have the resources to produce a slick-sounding recording. Bands such as this that also display energy when performing on stage find it doubly hard to produce a recording that aptly translates this energy. This usually results in low-quality releases, so when I put this record on I wasn’t expecting much.
When it first starts out, you might be wondering if you’ve set your record player to the right rpm. What you’re hearing sounds a bit like the backing music for a scene out of some magic-themed movie. But don’t worry, the only good thing about this vinyl is not just the way my somehow warped copy amusingly spins up and down in waves. If I was hearing 'MARIA' on the radio for the first time, I would assume it was something by an international act from the top 40 charts. Not only is the quality due to the format on which this single was released, it also comes down to the band’s own talent for writing a good song.
Having inspected the cover earlier and noticing that side B contained simply a remix of the single, I again lowered my expectations, and this time I was not disproved. The use of remixes to pad up a single is an annoying tactic used all too often these days. It seems kind of lazy to simply re-use the same song but with slight differences. It also seems more logical, considering that people who purchase your single want to sample your album, to release another one of your songs as a b-side. Especially when in this case the b-side sounds like someone’s just laid down a heavy drum beat over the unchanged song. I’d expect this kind of thing to be done to provide nightclubs with a more ‘dancy’ version of the original song, but it’s pointless since the original is catchy enough to be played on its own.
If you don’t already have a record player, you’re probably not going to want to rush out and buy one just to listen to this single. And if you’ve caught onto vinyl simply for the novelty of it, you might be disappointed by the fact that this one is made in the standard black colour. Perhaps Soft Tigers should have taken a leaf out of Red Riders’ book, who recently released a single on red vinyl (and used a new song as a b-side). If you do own a record player and appreciate the quality of vinyl though, then you should by all means own this single.
