Telefon Tel Aviv, Immolate Yourself
Featured Album
Far and away the best album of their career. And with the death of member Charles Cooper, maybe their last
The Chicago-based, New Orleans-originated Telefon Tel Aviv are respected, but not loved. Their first two records made clear that they have exceptional taste — and isn't that 50% of why you make a record? — but knowing what moved them didn't exactly make for a moving experience on the listening end. And that's ultimately why Fahrenheit Fair Enough (2001) and Map of What Is Effortless (2004) didn't stick around: there wasn't much of a foundation beyond what they sounded like. There wasn't a deep emotional hook — it was too easy to walk away from the albums without feeling anything one way or another. For a piece of art, there are few worse fates.
With the excellent Immolate Yourself, Telefon Tel Aviv are now a very, very different group. Musically, there is a dramatic shift from the soundtrack-friendly IDM of TTA's past to a dreamy, sweeping synth-pop feel currently most closely associated with M83. The reason Immolate Yourself succeeds where its predecessors failed has a lot to do with that stylistic change. The aesthetics of synthpop carry an implicit emotional burden; the lush sounds, resigned vocals, languid pace and enveloping depths of great synthpop invariably sound like exact, aural definitions of emotions like wistfulness and loneliness. It's what teenage introspection sounds like.
Charles Cooper, who died tragically shortly before the album's release, and Joshua Eustis, the two men who make up Telefon, never break character on Immolate: from the opening, dramatic sighs of "The Birds" to the closing, linked trio of "Your Every Idol," "You Are the Worst Thing in the World" and "Immolate Yourself," the album is all rounded corners and pillowed layers, every word hushed, every lyric impossible to understand. But the sound is powerful and it is moving, and when the last keyboard fades back into its drizzly home, where it goes, you will readily follow.
