Tidetied play with their potential on ‘Valley’
Remember The Blinders? I know, I know, it’s annoying to forever attach an artist to their old, long-retired project, but lately, I’ve been revisiting the band a lot.
The Blinders really had it. Forming in Doncaster before moving to be based in Manchester, their first two albums were some of the most promising and interesting rock music of the late 2010s. There are a lot of bands out there who claim to have read the Beats and seen all the artsy movies, but with the depth of their references, The Blinders genuinely and clearly had.
On their first album, Columbia, that all came mixed in with impassioned politics. Tracks like ‘L’Etat C’est Moi’ or ‘I Can’t Breathe Blues’ were protest tunes at their fiercest, and always told through an interesting and sharp Orwellian lens. Then on their follow-up, Fantasies of a Stay at Home Psychopath, the band’s storytelling powers and their broadening influences grew to be golden, especially on the standout single ‘Circle Song’.
Then something broke. Members left, new ones joined, and when they returned in 2024 with Beholder, it felt as though they were trying too hard. Suddenly, they seemed like one of those bands eager to show off their influences rather than wearing them naturally. Perhaps sensing that themselves, they eventually split.
But I thought the key to it all surely always came down to Thomas Haywood, the band’s singer and assumed principal songwriter. So when he announced his new project, first called Whitehorse, and now renamed Tidetied, I was curious.
I was suddenly more interested when the other members were revealed as John McCullagh and Nathan Keeble, both artists from some excellent but now-defunct Sheffield bands, particularly Children Of The State. With a lineup made from parts of once-great machines, Tidetied clearly have potential. But on their new song ‘Valley’, that promise is not shining as brightly as it should.
‘Valley’ isn’t a bad song, by any measure. Haywood still carries one of the best voices around, and the song still shimmers with the songwriting powers he used to bring to The Blinders, where the magic lies in little off-the-cuff, rhyme scheme-breaking, sharp shoots. But the issue is that it lacks passion or clarity.
In the instrumental, there’s a Townes Van Zandt country thing happening, while over the top, distortion dances across the track. The two can work in interesting tandem, but neither one is going hard enough to make that happen. Instead, it becomes kind of placid and dull. It’s a song that feels like it’s trying to be inoffensive, when the greatness of Haywood’s best work is his complete disregard for that, storming into a song like ‘Where No Man Comes’, screaming “I fornicate with women in my head”.
Is this a case of an artist losing faith? With the project formed and collapsed, it can be hard to dust off the energy, but if Haywood and his new team can, there’s a strong future to be forged, one hinted at on the band’s other tunes like ‘Doesn’t Come Close’. They simply have to stop playing nice and run at it with a vengeance.
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