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The
very name of this new French band evokes an icy cold modern world. It’s not to
add an impersonal touch to this review but I will refer to the songs as numbers
because we have received this promo cd devoid of tracklisting.
Telefax
often seems to be a laboratory rather than a flesh and blood band. Songs are
modern experiences, collages which could be used for a soundtrack but to a film
that would have an abstruse universe, an abstract atmosphere. They evolve so
fast that you feel almost relieved when the singing is replaced by discreet
voiced samples (n°4).
Songs are in constant evolution: there is a new layer of sound in almost each
bar. This is certainly indicative of a long, lush work but it makes the
listening all the more difficult. A cold electronic sound, a new guitar note, a
bit of synth sound, sample of voices, everyday noises, industrial noises.
Everything’s juxtaposed. Changing atmospheres. Sometimes the songs seem to be
strange patchwork (n°5, n°10). N°7 starts as an almost organic instrumental
song and then shifts to nicely awkward soundscapes haunted by reversed voices
until a French talking narrator comes to the fore.
There
is an overabundance of images as if the lyrics were a slide show sorted out for
ecstasy.
In n°1, the voice keeps repeating ‘l’herbe envahit tout’ (meaning
‘grass is overgrowing everything’) but this track has nothing bucolic about
it. N°2’s electro rhythm is sanitized, an impression which is backed up by
the hygiaphone effect on the vocals. There are too many singing entwined and it
gives the impression that they talk but never try to listen to each other.
It’s depersonalized, it conveys incommunicability, alienation. N°9 conveys
the unpleasant impression that the narrator is totally lost in a modern
industrial world where he becomes mad and talks nonsense while the back voice
(Thomas Mery’s) seems to make fun of him. This is amplified in N°11’s
utmost modernity. The voices are horridly repeating ‘un – zero – un”
making the song a closed circuit, uttering short sentences, cut & dry,
establishing relations between one another while they are apparent nonsense.
If you like sanitized musical atmospheres evoking a cold modern universe,
you’ll probably like this album since its arrangements are particularly lush
and finely-worked.
-Blacklisted
Igor
/apr 15th 2003/