The Telescopes – Hidden Fields

Behold thy glorious racket. In their various guises, psych veterans The Telescopes have constantly forged routes between the tropes of melodic shoegaze and abrasive, full-on dissonance; it’s almost as if Stephen Lawrie can’t quite fathom where allegiance should lay. Which is no bad thing, as eighth album Hidden Fields suggests. Slow burning rather than outright incendiary, yet each of the five tracks pulse in sly patterns, the dense, fuzzy contours are a riptide, licking its lips at unwary swimmers.  

Opener You Don’t Know The Way swarms across its portentous bass line, Lawrie’s vocals weary and porous, whilst Absence wraps itself up in a fugue eerily reminiscent of early Spiritualized. Strands of melody underpin much of this, but the undoubted highlight is the 15 minute closing track The Living Things, which eschews bright lights for a relentless, strung-out groove that could be twice its length and still not outstay its welcome. This is a complex, bruising burr of a record; a fine addition to canon. [Duncan Harman]