#3374 The Telescopes - Exploding Head Syndrome

3.5/5
Maybe I'm just high _ _but: is this a concept album about having a concussion? The muffled mix puts the music in a little ball in the center of your awareness, in contrast with the sparkies, stray, high buzzes that arc in place like ripped synapses, who're given massive tracts of sonic space to themselves. Everything loops, everything slips, the words are barely audible. It's not that they're far away away from you, you're far away from them. And it doesn't relent. All the round tones stay contained, the sharp ones roam lazily, the pace never quickens, the haze never clears. Glimpses of love lost, song titles told as little sentence snippets, mention of Nothing, End, Why, Never, Don't, "Everything is in the Moment" in French. And then on the last song, a lone buzz and no backup, a sparkie frozen in a moment of waking. And in that quiet the music slinks in, the words clearer and closer than they've been. And halfway through the music rises and the buzz is gone, before coming back deeper, steadier, and integrated into an ascendant full-band sound, still dark and plodding and strange, but out of its frequency oubliette and at full strength.

I don't know if I like it for listening to exactly, but I've never heard production much like it, and no album feels much like it, and heck that's tough to come by these days.