It’s been precisely half a circuit around the sun since The Heliocentrics released their last album, Infinity of Now, in February. The world has changed dramatically since then, and this new slew of sounds reflects that intensely. It’s darker, dirtier, and angrier. If Infinity was an esoteric chimera, Telemetric Sounds is a biomechanical monstrosity.
The collective’s capacity for wisely splicing together the points of commonality between an assortment of out-there styles is long since established, consistently producing music that defies familiar conventions (song structure, most obviously) yet manifests as something vivid and convincing.
“Space Cake” is the lightest, sweetest, and most cohesive piece here, though no less hallucinatory than the rest. Elsewhere, the tone is a lot less amicable, with simple, surly proto-punk attacks occurring frequently, and numerous detours into menacing sound collage. “Shattered Mind” digs ever deeper into dark thoughts, reaching a pretty scary place before gathering itself and shuffling off to lick its wounds.
Perhaps we’ll wait another six months for further heliocentricity, and perhaps by that point, circumstances will shift for the better, and with it, the group’s tone. In the meantime, dig into the darkness here because there’s a brilliance and beauty to it regardless.
