Tennis - Yours Conditionally

Pitchfork 64

If you know just one thing about the duo Tennis, it’s probably that they were born at sea. Their craft is called Swift Ranger, it’s 30 feet from stem to stern, and it inspired Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore’s first album, 2011’s Cape Dory. For their latest, Yours Conditionally, Tennis clambered back onto the boat for an ocean jaunt—from San Diego to the Sea of Cortez—and, they hoped, for artistic rejuvenation.

But whether they are landlocked or bobbing at sea, Tennis remain devoted to a specific span of musical history, drawing on the beautifully rendered tunes that emerged between pop’s Wall of Sound era and the eruption of punk’s unkempt energies, give or take a few years. Think along the lines of Evie Sands’ “I Can’t Let Go,” a stringless version of the Carpenters’ “They Long to Be (Close to You),” Dusty Springfield’s “Easy Evil,” and the “Angel” side of Fleetwood Mac’s catalog. These are unimpeachable reference points—plenty of other acts would do well to study similar benchmarks—but they also pose a forbiddingly high bar.

On 2014’s Ritual in Repeat, Tennis rose above pastiche and wrote a few sturdy tunes that stood apart from the history they channelled. The group achieves this again two or three times on Yours Conditionally, displaying a keen appreciation for harmony, balmy keyboards, and analog-sounding bass. When the guitar doubles and then embellishes the primary progression on the outro of “Baby Don’t Believe,” or when Moore arcs her singing downward without warning on “Modern Woman,” the band lifts off.

Lyrically, the album seesaws between portraits of perfect love and something decidedly more ambivalent. “My Emotions Are Blinding” drips with sarcastic self-effacement: “If the night goes exactly as planned,” Moore sings, “I’ll be giving all my attention/To the world’s most interesting man.” She delivers sweet nothings in the next song, “Fields of Blue”—“I really love you, I cannot help myself”—milking the contrast between tone and message.

“Ladies Don't Play Guitar” is more pointed. Here, Moore offers a send-up of female-as-male-muse, adding bite and an incisiveness that feels new for this band. “Ladies don’t play guitar/ Ladies don’t get down down to the sound of it,” she sings. “Maybe we can play pretend?” Moore, of course, does play guitar; on Yours Conditionally, she also contributes keys, piano, and some percussion. As she presents a caricature of a woman on the sidelines supporting her rock-star-lover’s dreams—“Ladies just need your love... I can be the archetype of whatever you’re feeling”—she undermines it immediately with her presence in the song.

Despite the lyrical punch, Yours Conditionally is hamstrung by Tennis’ drums. The keys and bass on the album are unfailingly warm, but the shabby percussion is one-note, almost the work of a different band. This feels like an eyesore amid an otherwise splendid view, an indie affectation that causes the duo to fall just short of their tasteful influences. It’s a shame, because Tennis’ return to Swift Ranger furnished them with some of their best material yet.

Drowned In Sound 60

Nonetheless, Tennis was not a project which you expected to survive more than one album cycle. Catchy as the songs were (and I still frequently revisit that record with pleasure) they were also pretty whimsical, and you suspected they didn’t really have anywhere else to go beyond their cutesy origin story. But now three more albums down the line, they’ve confounded expectations, translating their relationship as husband and wife from press release fodder to a substantive part of their artistry.

As they’ve matured over their albums, gender roles and societal expectations of married life have become a key focus of their work, and never more so than on this album. Even the title itself is a wry dig at the idea of passively relinquishing autonomy to a partner forever, while the songs continue to explore the relationship between the institution of marriage and feminism. Songs like ‘My Emotions Are Blinding’ and ‘Ladies Don’t Play Guitar’ are some of Alaina Moore’s most confident and caustic meditations on gender yet, taking sexist tropes at face value to satirise them.

In wresting their relationship from the fluff of their own write ups, and putting it at the heart of their maturation as a band, Tennis cleverly manage to both honour and subvert their origin story at the same time. And since they are able to pull off that near-impossible balancing act, it doesn't feel hokey that they’ve taken another boat trip for this record either. Not that you can hear it, mind. Gone are the soft calypso and surf-rock influences, along with the diary-entry lyrics about literally being on a boat. Instead, you are able to accept it as the preferred artistic process of a bona fide band, rather than as some sort of gimmicky exercise. This is an admirable feat.

Sadly though, while the artistic vision of Tennis has hit its stride, the music itself is a little adrift on Yours Conditionally. The core of Tennis’ sound hasn’t moved much in four albums - jangly guitars, light keys and rustling drums. Undoubtedly, Moore has massively developed as a vocalist as well as a songwriter. Backing up her own lead vocals with with a choir of soft harmonies; her performance has developed an incredible soulfulness and vulnerability alongside strident confidence, flitting between the two modes with ease. But the simple and skeletal arrangements don’t make natural canvases for the larger ambitions of the songwriting and vocal performances.

This problem seeped in around the time of their last album, following the fine balance of their second record (the criminally underrated Young And Old) but now it takes proper root. Ritual In Repeat had the snap and pop of songs like ‘Callin You’, two parts Madonna to one part Carol King. This was a great sound for Tennis. The closest here is ‘My Emotions Are Blinding’ but it’s something of an outlier. Most of the time, they drift through a mid-tempo lilt; earnest, weepy and sometimes saccharine; walking a fine line between easy listening and background music. When you heard Cape Dory, you probably didn’t expect Tennis to be growing into soulful artistry six years and three albums later, and they deserve an incredible amount of credit for that. But you definitely wouldn’t ever have expected them to sound dreary either, and that’s something of which Tennis are slightly guilty on Yours Conditionally.