Album: The Telescopes - Growing Eyes Become String

Back in 2013, fuzz-heavy space cadets the Telescopes headed off to Berlin and then back to Leeds to record an album of intoxicating tunes that were written as they were recorded while relying on “the heightened instinct of being entirely in the now”. However, things came to a grinding halt due to a crashed hard-drive and the project was unfortunately abandoned.

Ten years later, some long-forgotten back-up recordings of the sessions turned up and the band’s main man Stephen Lawrie decided to dust down and polish up seven of the original tracks of raw and trippy sounds for release as Growing Eyes Become String. Loaded with swirling melodies, experimental noise, improvisation, searing feedback and pounding beats, it’s an album of hypnotic, narcotic wooziness that will no doubt provide a welcome winter warmer for many of our psychedelic brethren, as they wait of the sun to return.

Opening track, “Vanishing Lines” is a spaced-out blast of repetition and feedback with a pulsating groove and enough reverb to rattle your eyeballs in their sockets, while “Get Out of Me” is an unsettling and claustrophobic, groggy drone. “(In the) Hidden Fields” brings a cosmic motorik chug to the proceedings, while “What You Love” has more than a dash of some of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s more dour moments. Indeed, Growing Eyes Become Strong provides something of a swirling trip that is reminiscent of the mid-80s sounds of the Spacemen 3 as well as the Reid brothers as it lays down its woozy trip and slow and considered drones. However, it’s considerably more than a historical document of what Lawrie and his confederates were up to a decade ago and its mesmerising and unearthly trip is surely still plenty powerful and disorientating enough both to spin heads and to get hips swaying along.

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