“Unwind” Ready To Explode

“When it comes to you, I’m a ticking time bomb,” Natalie Tuttle sings on ​“Irony,” the third cut on her new EP, Unwind. She’s singing about romance. She might be singing about the start of something big.

The singer, songwriter, and guitarist has been making the rounds of New Haven’s venues for a few years now, from Cafe Nine to the Outer Space, where she has also worked. In her solo performances, she has a way of being quietly dazzling as she propels her simple, catchy songs forward with a continuously reinventive set of guitar techniques and textures, honed over years of thought and practice. Unwind features four of the songs she’s been perfecting on stage for a while.

Far, far too often, when musicians go into the studio to capture the sound they get live, the results fall flat. On one extreme are bands that just end up sounding sloppy. On the other are bands that perform well, but with no life; for whatever reason, the electricity they capture on a stage doesn’t run through them once the tape is rolling.

Perhaps because she’s also a sound engineer, Tuttle avoids this problem entirely: Unwind is a near-perfect introduction to the musician and her songs. Engineered, mixed, and mastered by Travis Bell at Adorea Recording Studio in Hamden, CT, the EP allows itself a few overdubs that wouldn’t be possible live. But it doesn’t sound like a studio creation; it comes across more as a beautifully miked live performance, capturing the warmth underneath the rasp in Tuttle’s voice and the sonic range of the many, many sounds she pulls, plucks, and knocks out of her acoustic guitar. One could lament that the EP has only four songs on it instead of being a full-length album, but each song is so well-crafted, and distinct from the others, that it’s possible to fix the problem by just putting the short album on repeat a few times.

If there’s an observation to be made about Unwind that isn’t simply praise, it’s to wonder where Tuttle will go from here. The EP is the product of a restless, unconventional musical mind. What will Tuttle do with it? Will she find other players with similar sensibilities and form a band? What will that sound like? Or will she dig deeper into what can be done with just a voice, two hands, and a guitar? Or something else entirely? The time bomb is Tuttle’s music itself, and it’s definitely ticking.