The 16th studio album from English drone rock explorers
the Telescopes epitomizes just how outside of linear reality the band chooses to stay. The seven songs that make up
Growing Eyes Becoming String were recorded at two very different sessions in 2013, thought to be lost forever due to a hard drive failure, miraculously recovered sometime in the years that followed, and then completed by
Telescopes leader and mainstay
Stephen Lawrie as the 2020s began before being properly released in 2024. A decade? A day? Meaningless designations of time to
Lawrie and his cohort, whose primal, space-out rock songs on this album could have been conjured up at any point in the group's run that dates back to the late '80s. The first four tracks were recorded in Berlin at the
Brian Jonestown Massacre's studio by engineer
Fabien Leseure, who sits in on synth. These songs range from hypnotic and motorik psychedelia on the
Velvets-meets-
Floyd feedback-fest "(In The) Hidden Fields," sinister
Spacemen 3 monotone on the black-hole noir of "Dead Head Lights," and gentle reflection on the subdued "We Carry Along." The remainder of the album was tracked (also in 2013) in Leeds with early
Telescopes producer
Richard Formby. These three songs are cut from a more similar cloth, with "Get Out of Me," "What You Love," and "There Is No Shore" all lurching and noisy midtempo dirges, rich with the kind of glazed-over guitar and synthesizer fuzz textures
the Telescopes have built their empire on. Though salvaged from the edge of nonexistence,
Growing Eyes Becoming String feels just as naturally a piece of
the Telescopes' specific bedazzled brand of rock as their other work. It taps into the band's specific continuum of noise and beauty, offering new modifications to the formula while folding back in on itself infinitely. ~ Fred Thomas
