Tell Me What You Miss The Most in OUTSIDELEFT

Tasha
Tell Me What You Miss The Most
(Father/Daughter)

Tasha has been an OUTSIDELEFT favourite from the moment we heard 2018s Alone At Last. Bathing as we did in the beauty of her self-styled, revolutionarily quiet moments. We’d often pop down to the factory floor, where this content is written and readied, and hear Tasha's balm soothing our key workers.

Tell Me What You Miss The Most, Tasha’s new LP, from Father Daughter records, is decidedly all Tasha, her idiosyncratic voice and gently insistent guitar, augmented this time by a band and woods and strings. The whole album is imbued with that delicious feeling… That feeling of when you want someone so badly, and when you have them, you can almost wish it would end there, end at the very beginning. Unsullied. Tasha’s songs don’t end there, of course, they are alive in the moments after that.

It’s an articulation and knowledge of need. If there is to be love, inevitably there will be loss. It’s never so sadly unsettling as to the contrary, the moments of recognising the dawning sadness are infused with a forlorn promise too, that future is yours to choose now. Dare to.

Tasha’s songs invite us in and then challenge us to subject ourselves to the most intimate psychological self-examination of what it is we believe moves our world and whether it still has the power to move it. Introspection and reflection are highly valued here. Profoundly, simply and eloquently asking and answering Tell Me What You Miss The Most, can leave us feeling dangerously overexposed. What is that thing for you? What do you miss the most? I sometimes like to ask my friends when they last danced around their living rooms with their significant others. You know why. And I’m not even talking about them.

I think perhaps this year, only Melanie Howard’s Such Small Hands record has managed such an emotional impact, so quietly.

Some of Tasha’s songs are for the ages of course, her lyrics tingle with a frisson that can only summon itself, you can’t wish it up…

I’ll find you late in the morning with sleep in your eyes,
Wish it was as simple as saying I think we’ll be fine.
from Dream Still

Then there’s the Cardigans-esque, hit ‘Perfect Wife’ a perfect pop confection.

Tell Me What You Miss The Most, for every good reason was Album of the Day on Bandcamp. It’s an LP suffused with the most essential human simplicity, sincerity and controlled complexity that surely suggest this to be the single greatest folk LP of the year. The more you listen, the more you will hear.