Review Summary: Innocuous chamber pop
We Were Heroes is the debut 4-track EP by German chamber pop songstress Tatia. As you traverse the quaint twelve-minute affair, you'll find only a couple of discernible pitfalls, but nothing unjustified in its right to exist. As the tepidly percussive opener "Sad Song" gets going, the most immediate comparison you'll draw will probably be Taylor Swift's
Folklore, but even more campy and ethereal. It wears the skin of that cottagecore aesthetic, and is plaintive seemingly on purpose. Tatia toys with a decidedly familiar berth of tropes; abandonment, addiction, romantic detachment, and so on. 'I still don't know how you could walk on your feet on that day,' she ponders to a nameless apparition, perhaps questioning their ability to move on so easily.
"Two Days" further zeroes in on that detachment, with Tatia lamenting that her romantic partner has taken themselves out of the mix emotionally. 'Time circles in two cycles. Days when I see you and the days in between,' she bemoans. Is she cataloging the relationship itself? Or the suggested failure of her partner to
see her as well? To look for the person behind the curtain. For a track where the only poignant thing going on is the tacit violin solo on the outro, Tatia does a good job of getting the listener to dissect her words. The title track is all about her fractured relationship with her alcoholic father, and the props she gives herself and her family for navigating those tricky waters. She likens them to 'knights in shining armor' as Bastian Kilper's drumming slowly ramps up in intensity. "The Streets You Walk" ends things by gliding in on some gentle piano fills. Tatia is at her most melancholic, though she implies she's not bidding a definitive farewell to the muse in the lyrics. 'When I'm back I'll walk the streets you walk,' she promises. Some brief guitar strobes on the bridge segue to twangy guitars and a fairly bouncy hook to finish things off.
We Were Heroes is a very competent piece of indie/chamber-pop, though that's not to say it doesn't have issues. Tatia's voice is pretty, but her delivery can be listless and unembellished at times. She's no doubt singing from the heart, yet she falls back on rote diarism more often than not. She's good at finding the words to say ultimately a little and not a lot. Her father's a worthless drunk and her partner possibly has wandering eyes, but we don't really learn too much about her at the end of the day, despite seeing things through her lens. The EP is a harmless use of twelve minutes, though, so dive in and see what you can take away from it.
