The first seconds of this second album by Other Lives are a steady stream of lock-step brass eighth notes quickly interrupted by a sylvan clarinet suddenly awash in a lilting choral plea bleeding over beats.  Tamer Animals plays the cataract; beginning in dissolution, the elements gather further, combining and growing in force, reaching a bombastic pathos, exhibiting the majesties of observation and depths of culpability:  the human condition made musical.  Other Lives are voices in burdened harmony, rhythm-keepers, strings of varying thickness resonating, woodwinds and brass, piano keys and console knobs.  Tamer Animals is one of the most powerful created elaborations of the inevitability of a crowned hope advancing to breach our resignation, thrusting through the detritus of the ever-dying day, leaving a singular pulsatile tinnitus in its wake.  “Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?”–Nietzsche.