Crackling languidly into life from the static of the great beyond, Telepathy are here with a lost, mysterious broadcast that doubles as their fourth album, Transmissions. From the very first politely frantic voices wanting to know if and how this broadcast is reaching you (‘Oath’), to the last quivering finger click of ‘Home’, there’s a wealth of cultural and musical touchpoints here, ranging from the fairly straightforwardly post-metal, to an overriding sense of urgency and impending menace that is particularly fitting for the current political climate.
The most important thing to start off with is that Transmissions is a grower of epic proportions. Initial listens mark it as a good, solid album, but nothing life-altering, or worth writing home about. Spending a good couple of weeks in its company has changed this significantly, because over repeated listens Transmissions unfurls itself gently, like a new leaf. Things that went unnoticed or unappreciated early on start to creep out, and create a web of nuance that just isn’t there the first time you run through this album. Another fun, but less crucially important element in play here is that the samples used in Transmissions are in places so well chosen, that there are a few points where the album can actually be at least partially reviewed in its own words. Which is an interesting proposition to say the least.
Telepathy’s self-described flavour of atmospheric cinematic metal is a broad enough church that there are any number of comparisons that could be made here. The list from the band themselves includes, but is not limited to, Tool, Russian Circles and Vangelis, although realistically the overall sound covers enough post-rock and post-metal ground that any instrumental, cinematic band in either genre is likely to have a fair bit in common with Telepathy. Nordic Giants, for example, spring to mind from a cinematic point of view, and because big swathes of Transmissions sound like they’re the soundtrack to something, and have been forcibly parted from their visuals.
Another one that looms large in terms of the overall style, approach to samples and effects, and their use of carefully chosen spoken word passages is Maybeshewill. While influences can often be narrowed down to particular albums or eras of the band in question, this is a slightly unusual case, in that an awful lot of Telepathy’s Maybeshewill influence can be traced to a single track. That track being ‘Not For Want of Trying’, which was the first reference point that leapt out of this album on initial examination.
The comparison to ‘Not for Want of Trying’ is particularly apt for the tail end of the album. This is where ‘End Transmission’, which includes a long spoken-word sample about genius and technological advancement, fades away as the ethereal first half of ‘Home’ flutters into life, and the combination of the two sounds for all the world like a darker, heavier sibling to Maybeshewill’s first two albums, slotting in somewhere in between the two. Then, a voice says “let’s begin”, an obscenely heavy chunk of sludgy post metal lands squarely on your head, and then it all drifts melodically to a close with one final finger click. As a pair of tracks, and the end of an album, it’s superbly done. Let’s begin indeed.
Elsewhere, there’s a more straightforward mix of samples, hooky, repetitive riffs that speed up and slow down in a way that’s genuinely hypnotic after a bit. The stronger tracks here are ‘Oath’, the lazy waltz beat of ‘Augury’ and the meandering urgency of ‘Tears in the Fibre’. The first two are singles (along with ‘End Transmission’) so it makes sense that they’re amongst the most accessible tracks on the album, whereas ‘Tears in the Fibre’ is the epitome of this album’s tendency to grow on the listener exponentially through repeated exposure.
Overall, it’s a superb slice of post-rock/metal, with some other genres lurking under its skin in various places, and more musical reference points than you can shake a stick at. The combination of samples, big, cinematic instrumentals, and hypnotic, repeating motifs has been done before, but it doesn’t get done this well very often.