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/