Where bought? I think about 2 months elapsed between picking up the EP and the debut album dropping. I was living in Manchester, so I am going to guess that I went back to Piccadilly Records to get it on or around the day it dropped.
One year after that raucous and joyous debut show, Crystal Antlers returned with a new album and played the larger Sound Control venue near Oxford Rd. station (now not a venue, and not particularly missed by me). The crowd was about the same size but in a much larger room. Some of the faces were definitely at the previous show. But the hype hadn't translated into growing success: the psych-punk train had stopped.
What went wrong? It is hard to put a finger on. Firstly, the show was distinctly average. The venue was inappropriate, sure, but the organ magic of Victor Rodriguez-Guerrero had disappeared. He had been replaced by a pretty girl with an expensive Nord stage keyboard, when VRG played a real Farfisa Duo. If this sounds mean then yeah, it probably is, and I am sure that girl had chops. But the whole thing did not work at all, trebly so for a band that is essentially a soul-powered psych train led by a brilliant organist.
But there was no way of knowing this ahead of the show unless there was some deep online Crystal Antlers scene I was unaware of (and given how uncritical fandoms are, I wouldn't have trusted it to see the wood for the trees here). Tentacles had dropped and at the time I remember thinking "well, not quite as powerful as the EP, but they've still got it!" VRG even plays all over the damn thing, so it's not a case of the key element of the sound had disappeared.
There are a few other possible reasons: the first single 'Andrew' was not a great lead-off. It's a good album cut, but as a single it reprises an earlier songwriting trick in a less-successful way, and also it isn't a representative piece. Touch and Go were also folding operations, and maybe they didn't give this record the push it needed to meet its audience.
Sure, Crystal Antlers, in their hairiness and unashamed rockacity, are not a band that would work for the increasingly professionalising indie sound of 2009, but there's no way that people wouldn't be into this if targeted accordingly. They were in NME and Pitchfork when you should have seen them at an ATP or something. It's not a crossover record: it is a real psych-punk effort.
This is the first time I've played Tentacles in a while and I've really enjoyed it. I'd go as far to say it is underrated and I feel mean for not even bothering with their next two albums. 'Swollen Sky' and 'Time Erased' are big-hearted and magical pieces and the intervening years have made the whole thing gel together quite nicely.
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