Baboon

"Baboon" is perhaps the most kinetic track on ttng's *Animals*, a record that otherwise rewards stillness. Tim Collis's guitar playing here is a study in controlled urgency — the fingerpicking pattern that underpins the song moves at a tempo that feels almost breathless, each note placed with clockmaker precision, yet the overall impression is of something slightly wild and barely contained, which fits the animal in the title. The picking has a percussive quality, the thumb bass note providing rhythmic grounding while the upper strings carry interlocking melodic figures that chase each other without quite resolving. The vocals arrive in a conversational murmur, the register low and close, as though the singer is narrating something from a position of exhaustion rather than performance. The lyrical mode is observational and anecdotal — a story told in clipped declarative sentences, mundane details given weight through repetition and placement. ttng at this moment belonged to Oxford's post-emo math rock underground, a world of introspective boys with guitars making technically demanding music about very ordinary emotional catastrophes. What makes "Baboon" specifically interesting is the tension between the complexity of the instrumental writing and the deliberate flatness of the vocal delivery — the two modes create a kind of emotional irony, the music more agitated than the singer will admit to being. It's for late afternoons when you're trying to convince yourself you're fine about something.