#shoegazepedia — The Telescopes
“Silently influential and consistently obscure, the Telescopes formed in Burton upon Trent, England in 1986, starting off as a noise rock band, then becoming shoegazers, then dream poppers, and later delving into electronics and avant-garde tendencies.
Over a long, interesting career mostly spent out of the spotlight, the group’s exploratory spirit produced numerous albums that rarely sounded like each other, swinging wildly from the muted acoustic melancholy and paisley-patterned rock of their 1992 self-titled album to the dark, hypnotic psychedelia of 2021’s Songs of Love & Revolution.”
Kick the wall
Their debut release was a split flexi disc with Loop on the Cheree label in 1988, which was given away with the Sowing Seeds fanzine.
There followed their debut single, “Kick the Wall”*, and “7th# Disaster” also on Cheree Records.
*: their Twitter account is named after this first record “Kick the wall”
Taste
They moved to the American What Goes On Records and released their debut album Taste and “The Perfect Needle” single which is perhaps their most famous song.
Creation
A live album appeared on Fierce Records and following What Goes On’s bankruptcy they signed to Creation Records.
In contrast to Taste’s noise-rock, a more laid back sound followed, described by journalist Alexis Petridis as having “an almost fragile sense of elegance and melody”, and the band scraped the lower reaches of the UK Singles Chart with the single “Flying”, and released The Telescopes, their second album, in 1992.
Lawrie explained the change in direction: “Your idea of perfection changes as you move on. I think we still hold the same approach to our music now, we still try just as many mad ideas, it’s just a lot more subtle and works to a different end”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Telescopes
Third wave
In 2002 they made a surprise return with Third Wave on Double Agent Records. In 2005 they released their fourth album #4 on their own Antenna Records. By this time they were a much more experimental band specialising in electronic soundscapes.
In April 2012 came two new singles, the first a drone version of Nick Drake’s “Black Eyed Dog” on the Trensmat label. The second, a new composition entitled “We See Magic and We Are Neutral, Unnecessary”. A flexi-postcard release on The Dream Machine label.
Tapete
In 2015, the Hidden Fields album was released by German label Tapete Records. It was described by AllMusic as shoegaze and noise pop, but more song-based than recent releases.
Exploding Head Syndrome was released in 2019 on Tapete Records. Dagger says “if you find beauty in churning guitars, a groggy organ and Lawrie’s half-mumbled lyrics (like I do) then you’ll find Exploding Head Syndrome to be the Raquel Welch of the year.”
Original guitarist David Fitzgerald died on December 17 2020, aged 54 of cancer.
Contenu soumis à la licence CC-BY-SA 3.0. Source principale : Article The Telescopes de Wikipédia en français (auteurs)
