T&tM Reviews
October 2011:Oxford Music Scene Magazine: Tamara and the Martyrs EP Review (pg26)"This is Tamara and The Martyrs’ début EP, a fifteen-minute showcase of one of the city’s most promising new bands. The opening track, ‘Payday Slag’, is lyrically brilliant, powerful and dynamic. I’ve previously said that I think this is the best song by a local band since ‘Creep’...
August 2011:Nightshift Magazine: Tamara and the Martyrs EP Review"Her voice, which forever sounds like it’s about to crack under the weight of all the world’s troubles, is, at times, such an astonishing instrument inits own right you barely notice everything else that’s going on in the songs."
June 2011: Nighshift Magazine:Tamara and the Martyrs support The Secret Sisters at the O2Academy"Tamara's voice seemingly possessed of a will of its own as it cracks and soars and sometimes emerges as a tigerish growl...at her most dramatic her songs carry a similar starkness and sense of turmoil to Jacques Brel..."
June 2011:Oxford Music Scene (pg.24)"Tamara & The Martyrs are a local band with much cohesion between the three of them. Better still, they’re difficult to describe in relation to other acts. There are very light shades ofPJ Harvey, of early Blondie and even of more recent popular acts like Dido in there. Tamara’s voice is almost without parallel on the local scene and the song ‘Payday Slag’ is the best I’ve heard from any local band since‘Creep.’ "-
June 2011:Live Unsigned: Tamara and the Martyrs EP Review "Blues and Americana, written and played with idiosyncratic creativity, humour, satire, melancholy and a great deal of appeal. This is musical poetry of a sort that I find hard to fault: it doesn’t fracture any stylistic boundaries, but it remains resolutely true to its makers’ artistic vision(s), and it’s continually, rigorously creative.*****
June 2011: Gappy Tooth Industries:"Tamara Parsons-Baker has received much acclaim over the past couple of years in Oxford for her keen voice and unnervingly visceral lyrics. Having joined–and frankly, stolen the limelight in Huck & The Handsome Fee, she’s rounded up a new backing band,The Martyrs, that will allow her to bring whatThe Oxford Mail called her Siouxsie Sioux elements to the fore, adding some backing to her rich, dark blues