After the unbroken assault of bleakness and noise that was
the Telescopes' 2017 album
As Light Return, main (and only)
Telescope Stephen Lawrie must have needed a break from all the stress and angst. 2109's
Exploding Head Syndrome dials the guitar skronk down to a simmer and the rhythms are set to hypnotic, as
Lawrie mumbles in (mostly) soothing tones in the background. It's a real change of pace, and like almost everything else the band have done in the preceding 30 years, the album is sonically challenging and truly uneasy listening. The songs roll and tumble like a churning washing machine, with overloaded guitars humming, organs grinding, and maracas keeping time. There's not much variation from song to song and the mix is deliberately murky, which means that it's best to just let the music rumble past and not dig too deep or expect to be knocked out by any one song. It's a mood
Lawrie is creating, not tracks for a play list or mixtape.
Exploding Head Syndrome is meant to be taken as a whole and it definitely works well that way. It's easy to start the record playing, then wake up 38 minutes later feeling clean and calm. Quite a different experience than the last album -- which left one feeling like they had been beaten by industrial machinery for an hour -- but that's one of the things that is great about
the Telescopes at this stage of their career. One is never quite sure what direction
Lawrie is going to head; all that's a given is that it's always a direction worth following, and
Exploding Head Syndrome holds true to that theory. ~ Tim Sendra