Tennis Say Goodbye on the Pensive Face Down in the Garden
The niche but beloved indie-rock couple/duo close out their 15-year career with a melancholic, introspective album, finding peace in finality following a fraught professional period for the two.
Tennis is one of those bands that never quite took off, but somehow always maintained a steadily solid reputation through sheer consistency. Fronted by singer Alaina Moore and her husband Patrick Riley, the Denver-born indie-rock pairing fashioned themselves as a kind of modern-day, alternative twin to the Carpenters (they even covered “Superstar” to really drive home the parallels). Their gentle, sun-dappled sound was slight and low-key but reliably balmy and accessible, the perfect mood-setter for a backyard shindig, a summer day at the beach, or a late night at a loungey bar. With Moore’s featherlight warble snugly complementing Riley’s very pretty compositions, Tennis found their groove early on and stuck to it, subtly refining their craft over time while retaining their cushy softness and adoration for swooning ‘50s pop and breezy ‘70s rock.
Their indefinite hiatus, announced just two weeks before the release of their latest and ostensibly final record Face Down in the Garden, marks yet another loss in the gradually declining class of nostalgia-tinged, lo-fi indie-rock duos that emerged in the early 2010s, like Best Coast and Girlpool. In their joint statement, Moore mentioned that multiple setbacks during touring for their previous album, 2023’s Pollen, led to this decision. Bummer that it is, sometimes it’s best to end something when it makes the most sense, especially when it seems like the universe is giving you clear signs to move on.
The blue tone of Face Down in the Garden is certainly fitting in that regard. The album carries the same pleasantly midtempo and brisk energy that saturates most of Tennis’s discography, but the band’s dissolution brings a more poignant touch to the despondent attitude and wistful longing in Moore’s lyrics and Riley’s instrumentation. Across Face Down in the Garden’s nine tracks, you can sense the two wanting to call it quits, evoking the same kind of defeated but necessary acceptance one experiences when ending a meaningful, long-term relationship or leaving their hometown behind. But don’t let the funereal vibes fool you into thinking Tennis has given up completely or gone full dour mode.
Though it might not reach the relative greatness of 2014’s Ritual in Repeat or 2017’s Yours Conditionally, arguably their most accomplished and resonant records, Face Down in the Garden is still an affecting, mature work. Considering the multitude of complications Moore and Riley faced leading up to making this LP—a chronic illness, an attempted robbery at sea, a blown tire that gets a shoutout in the title of the penultimate track—perhaps it deserves a little slack for staying at a somber simmer instead of going out with a bang.