single review & video premiere
The Baby Seals
Tamoo Trance
Trapped Animal Records
Out now
Their debut album Chaos, made LTW’s Albums of 2024 list and following recent tour dates with Bow Wow Wow, Cambridgeshire’s finest, fun-seeking, feminist garage-punks The Baby Seals are sharing a fierce new single. It’s about getting stuck in a trance-like state whilst online shopping at a phonetically misspelled, I mean, completely fictional outlet, says Ged Babey.
Have you done your Xmas shopping yet?
If you haven’t, then you don’t wanna use Tamoo.
Don’t go on, don’t get sucked in
Cause 80% of what you buy goes directly in the bin !
‘Tamoo Trance’ offers a fierce take down of consumer capitalism and the effect it can have on us if we let it take it hold. Front woman Kerry explains:
“… (it’s) about noticing how quickly we get entrapped online into spending money, and spending the latest form of currency, our attention, and questioning how to break away from it. It’s about how horrifying excess is. The fictitious shop, Tamoo, which looks like it should come with a gamblers aware warning sign, stocks everything you’ve never wanted, and it’s not just your money it will cost you being there.”
Whilst the video isn’t gonna win any awards for technique or artistic skill the band certainly look like they’re having a lot of fun making it. And it’s not AI-bollocks and they don’t feel the need to hatch out of an egg covered in lube to grab the attention of teenage boys.
It’s just a great song with a big riff, squalling feedback and captures their live energy, humour and sound.
The Baby Seals were one of the best bands I saw live this year. And there are a lot of female-with-attitude bands around vying for attention. Some are pretentious, some just try-too-hard and some resort to old-fashioned sex-sells exposure. (I am a male pig for daring to say this obvs.) The Baby Seals have been a band for a decade or more and avoid falling into any of those traps. They just rock. Dismantling the patriarchy one riff at a time (to paraphrase Amy Britton)
This is the first of a series of releases they say and presumably an album, tour and lots more fierce, feminist, fun and frolics to come.
In the meantime, Happy Xmas shopping.
All words Ged Babey but PR content in italics
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