Telepathe: Dance Mother (V2)

Funny thing about Bernard Sumner: he never whooped on record. Well, that’s a lie; he did once or twice, but the whoop wasn’t really part of New Order’s studio arsenal – whereas live, he peppered the air with the things, fistfuls of endearing/embarrassing firecrackers. But, for the main, his natural impulses were held in check, no doubt wisely so. A whoop misplaced can be dangerous.

Or powerful: two minutes into Telepathe’s ‘Chrome’s On It’, one or the other of Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais lets a very noticeable whoop fly. I can’t help but feel it points to why I like this record so very much. It doesn’t make the song; the song would be fine without it. But it’s a daft, awkward, Missy-ish exhalation of ebullience and the most tangible signal that Telepathe’s strange take on r’n’b is as much a slightly transgressive, fangirl tribute as it is an icy, Dave Sitek-helmed exploration of the genre as a 21st Century sonic artform. Probably you’ll figure that out from the preceding passage, where the duo po-facedly declare ”I can feel the real bang-bang, I can do the real thang-thang”. But the jive talkin’ is dispatched with forensic detachment, and although that accounts for much of the thrill, it takes that whoop to reassure you that this is all supposed to be, y’know, fun.

Dance Mother only sports three tracks that overtly subscribe to pop-r’n’b dynamics and vernacular – the other two being the heartbroken ‘In Your Line’ and heartbreaker ‘Lights Go Down’ – but they’re vital, offering colour and balance, allowing Gangnes and Livaudais to focus elsewhere upon abstract palettes of sepia and muted neon. Over the course of ‘I Can’t Stand It’, lasting a near-seven minutes, almost nothing happens (or at least, nothing changes), but that’s what makes it so magnificent: a grandiose cloud of clipped, synth strings, undulating and echoing without heading anyplace in any particular direction, a slow-shifting canvas onto which the frostily poised lyric “I can’t stand to watch this going down” is as projected, stylised and heartbreaking as a golden age Hollywood melodrama.

By contrast, ‘Devil’s Trident’ is all direction, a nagging ascent that twitches and tics its way upwards with no breaks, no diversions, words a buzzing background chatter save for a discernible repeat plea to “provoke a frenzy in me, my love”. It’s the urban itch that David Byrne spent the Seventies listlessly scratching, reconfigured into a murky upwards spiral of electricity and harmony. Yet, as with ‘I Can’t Stand It’, ‘Devil’s Trident’ is one musical idea worked through without interruption, shorn of contrast, chorus or catharsis. It might intensify as the vocals pile up and additional synths join the fray – it might become increasingly disorientating and you may find yourself gulping and shaking as its artificial weaves tighten – but it moves in a straight line: relentless, shark-like.

This is how they operate, pop dynamics only invoked for those vital r’n’b cribs. And they pull it off, the exception proving the rule being ‘Trilogy – Breath Of Life, Crimes And Killings, Threads And Knives’ which proves as unwieldy as its title. Only 10 seconds longer than the unchanging eddies of ‘I Can’t Stand It’, even relatively subtle shifts in direction make its tri-part atmospherics feel palpably diminished when taken as a whole. Significantly different in tone to the noisier, less disciplined Farewell Forest EP, you could legitimately peg Dance Mother as the sound of a band in some sort of transition – and live reports would suggest it’s the r’n’b hip-hop mould that they’re leaning towards. Which is exciting. Just so long as they remember to take their whoops with ‘em.

Originally published in Plan B #41: back issues available here.