The Telescopes
As Light Return

I have always considered Lou Reed, for various reasons, as the quintessential rock star. No one like him embodied in his person and his productions all the contradictions of rock 'n' roll. Practically a big joke.

A controversial and truly suffering personality, Lou Reed exhibited arrogant and diva-like attitudes and released records that are mostly garbage, but how could it be otherwise if he was trapped in such a psychologically complex situation. The truth was that Lou hated himself and perhaps came to terms with this inner struggle only in the last years of his life.

How should we understand in this sense 'Metal Machine Music' (RCA, 1975) then? What better way for such a complex personality to self-destruct than to create an unlistenable record which he himself declared he never listened to from start to finish and which practically had no real ending due to that trick that made the last groove of the vinyl play endlessly. 'Metal Machine Music' is an expression of artistic fury but also of blind rage against oneself. No awareness. Over the years, this record has been truly influential and I am not saying this happened by chance, but its success is due to what we could call unawareness.

In 2017, forty years later, there is however not the same unawareness in the discography production of Stephen Lawrie's Telescopes, who on the contrary demonstrate they can master perfectly those noise rock sounds which in the case of this band originating from Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, England, do not constitute indeed real experimentation, but conscious avant-garde and knowledge of sound from every musical and conceptual point of view.

'As Light Return' consists indeed in a skillful manipulation of empty spaces in which sound waves loaded with fuzz, feedback, and distortions compose music that is not just avant-garde for its own sake, but what is a real album made of songs that hit straight to the heart and nervous system of the listeners. Sometimes without neglecting the melodic component, as in 'You Can't Reach What You Hunger', which might remind of the noisier episodes of Jesus and Mary Chain like some works by Brian Jonestown Massacre of the last decade, or in the case of the fury of 'Something In My Brain', an instrumental track where the ghost of Kurt Cobain from 'Bleach' appears; the long obsessive litany of 'Hand Full Of Ashes'. Conversely, we can consider 'Down On Me' and the concluding fifteen minutes of 'Handful Of Ashes' as more typically instrumental noise tracks: the first is a sort of drone mantra with new-age culture references, it proposes itself as a composition with meditative content and allows one to ideally imagine the changes from one state to another in the world of chemistry, according to the alterations of every point of balance; the second is a sort of happening characterized by post-industrial sounds and subliminal expressionist visions with high emotional content.

Created by Stephen Lawrie with the collaboration of the band members of St. Deluxe (already his collaborators in the past) and recorded at the Riverside Music Complex in Glasgow, 'As Light Return' is another chapter of that music we call avant-garde. Shoegaze here has nothing to do with it, if this has been considered a phase in the history of the Telescopes, of those sounds remains only a certain trace in the emotional component which is in any case present even in the darkest and noisiest compositions and in that border between music and obsession where few other contemporary bands manage to move with the same naturalness.