Telescreens

One Liner:  Strokes-ian sloppy rock and roll coming after some terrible early stuff

Wikipedia Genre:  No Wikipedia, this is alternative rock, indie rock, garage rock

Home: NYC (originally from L.A.)

Poster Position: 23
Weekend One Only.
Saturday at 3:10.

BMI Stage.

Thoughts:  Fascinating dichotomy here.  When you fire up their tunes on Spotify, the most popular songs are from 2023's Stare Wide, which is some tasty Strokes-ian rock and roll slop.  But then if you keep listening, sooner or later you get to the deeply awful 2020 album The Return, which is more like 21 Pilots or something where it verges on electronica rap and is super sucky.  I literally just heard another song from it as I was writing a letter and was like NOPE, MUST WRITE THIS THING!  I can't hear those songs again.

A telescreen is a two-way video device that was used in Orwell's 1984.  Don't worry, I didn't just independently remember that factoid.  They are sources of propaganda and tools of constant surveillance.  Sounds like our phones today!  Yay!  Wikipedia has an entry for another band, which I assume is not this one, called Telescreen, which is from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but which is not the same Telescreen that is available to stream on Spotify, which is a Melbourne indie pop group.  Weird.  But this band was formed by a guy named Jackson Hamm, with some buddies from his high school in L.A.  The bio I am reading says that they originally had a folk rock vibe, which is most definitely not reflected in any of their Spotify output.  He moved to NYC to attend the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU, where be met Alex Bean and they started working together.

Random aside - it must be SO WEIRD to go to a school like NYU or Belmont or Julliard or whatever where everyone there is some sort of rad musician and you could be walking among the perfect collaborator for your sound.  Like, the guy eating too much soft serve in the cafeteria might be the next Pharrell, or the girl buying a sweatshirt in front of you at the Co-op may be the next Maggie Rogers.  Wild stuff.

Anyway, Bean now has nothing to do with the band (that I can tell), but it is a four-piece bashing their way through sloppy rock and roll pleasures.  "Phone Booth," from that more recent album, is the top streamer with 911k streams.

That is some deliciously danceable bashing right there.  Feels like I would be required to do the Molly Ringwald and kick dirt on everyone around me during that track.  "Lost" is a similar track with a driving beat and fun groove.  I wanna dance!

So long as we can all agree that they will stick with their recent sound and not dip back into the old bag of tricks where their sound sucked, then let's do this thing.  I'm in.