Telescreens Preach Neo-Rock in LP 7
Photo Credit: Jeff Thomas
Casting a wide net across their influential artist pool, NYC’s Telescreens captures fruitful, complex neo-rock with enough clashing snare to drown out the subway.
Rich in allusive preaching, the band’s third and most expressive album, 7, thrashes through constant sonic reconstruction and violently weaves in and out of New York’s sharp corners with a gritty, punchy pace. Channeling Interpol and Walkmen-level angst, the LP makes you feel like you’re walking through Manhattan trying to break up with someone over the phone: driving guitar jabs, pounding drum fills, and a desire for freedom muffles the chronic noise.
Hit single “Phone Booth” boasts aggressive raw energy in its raspy vocals and revving drums. When vocalist Jackon Hamm sings – “Took up the high rise / Underneath some rat’s mind,” therein marks a quest for new perspective, or probably an escape, and maybe an IG story post (flex). Exploring the duality of demanding connection and fearing the end, garage-rock mammoth “Games” collides a catchy sing-along chorus with hostile punk-rock drivers and stops you from thinking about anything else except The Moment. Explosive and urgent, both singles detach from the prismatic escapism Gen Z drowns their time in and arrests your attention instead, harnessing jangly riffs and haunting shouts in pursuit for “a better time,” “a way down,” “a friend,” and “a better way outside.”
It seems that they did find a better way outside, or down from the high-rise, for blues ballad “Johnny” breathes the midnight city air as it cuts through punk-rock imitation and reverts to the older, seedier sounds of The Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet. The song reaches into the cobwebbed chest of 1970s rock iconography with matter-of-fact storytelling and ringing ivory keys to try on for size realism and rhythm––and it fits how you’d expect out of a band claiming “Rock and Roll lives in New York City.”
Crawling the streets at night, songs “Burns” “Wide” and “The Bends” warp distorted post-punk sound into atmospheric songwriting and tiptoe around the edges of what has already been done before, opting to head back inside after finding no new inspiration. In the LP’s finale, “Lost Ants,” the band projects Radiohead’s forlorn with Strokes’ cool remove as they stumble into the heart of a vulnerable, harrowing reality: we’re all a little lost looking for sanctity.
From not knowing how to get down from the building of an idea you climbed up to and getting distracted on a break up call, these songs are ripe with aimless searching, leaving the band to draw conclusions from larger, more robust connections.
New York City’s Telescreens reach their fingers into the folds of transgressive rock and turn it inward, bridging contact with the world they live in. They clash the ancient center of sub-genre music into new, consumable art without regurgitating old sound. Though at times iterative and contemplative, the band embodies the center of their influences by curating a library of their experiences, preaching unity and ultimately magnifying new rock in today’s liquidated sonicscape.
Even with the acclaim of Scott Lipps and backed by Tom Windish (Billie Eilish, King Krule), the New York City four-piece are only at the beginning of their fidi high-rise climb, as they comb through their newest unreleased album and wrap up their first American tour with Marc E. Bassy and Skizzy Mars. Where they go next is determined by how they choose to express what is, what has been, and what will always be, the world inside looking for a way out.
A jaunt up and down the fire escapes anyone?