TELYSCOPES “High Fidelity Drag” (Giraffe Boy)

Did you expect to fall in love again today? I didn’t. Philly’s Telyscopes have me hook, line, and sinker, their earwormy bait a distant memory in my gullet as I’m reeled toward my waterless death, and other fishing metaphors. Look, High Fidelity Drag is the missing link connecting Sloan, the Flaming Lips, and Neutral Milk Hotel, and I for one do not want to re-up on that pre-intellectual hominid existence. I’m ready to be washed in the blood of angelic harmony, gussied up by home-recorded fuzz or not. Telyscopes has it in spades. Is it a Philly thing? I get Philly. It’s a thing.

High Fidelity Drag is “loosely inspired by … Watership Down,” and while I’ve not read the book, I’ve seen the film (and done a podcast about it, which I’d link to if the internets weren’t so BLOODY CRUEL, but here’s the link to the page that once hosted it). I dunno. All that to say, Fall of Efrafa pretty convincingly built their whole ethos and identity around Watership Down, so there’s a benchmark to live up to. But since I can’t really speak very coherently on the subject of Watership Down and how it comes across in music or whatever, I’m not going to compare anything and just suggest that Telyscopes are worth your time to check out. What do you got going on this afternoon?

https://telyscopes.bandcamp.com/

https://giraffeboy.bandcamp.com/

  

--Ryan

TELYSCOPES "High Fidelity Drag” C48 (Silver Bullet Recording Collective?)

Sometimes, you hear a band and obnoxiously opine, “now, just why the hell did this band that sounds JUST like this other band really NEED to put out an album of their own?”

And, with rock music, you’re usually right. The bewildering volume of underwhelming knock-offs could stretch from here to Uranus, for sure, but Philadelphia’s Telyscopes? Dude! Dude not only deserves a “pass” but some serious cheering from the sidelines! Touch (Get-the-Fuck) Down! Olympic levels of reappropriation here! Light and carry that long-extinguished torch! We miss it soooo much!

Remember the ‘90s heyday of Elephant 6’s re-envisioning of the Beatles & Beach Boys infectious choral work and tie-dyed riff psychedelia? Well, “High Fidelity Drag” picks up where early Of Montreal left off, mixing the Lo-Fi aesthetic of Cherry Peel with the frenetic, dizzying near-progginess of Satanic Panic In the Attic’s surfy, Wilsonian charisma…and then he adds in some downright funk-doppelganger OM’y bass lines. This tape is a serious keeper for mid-evening party-jamz-kicking! Long live Psychedelphia!

https://telyscopes.bandcamp.com/album/high-fidelity-drag

--Jacob An Kittenplan