Critical retention: Telepathe

Band: Telepathe

Genre: Experimental, Electro-pop

Size: 2

Place: Brooklyn

The Wikipedia page for New York duo Telepathe still speaks of them in the present tense, like they’ve not split up. Like their last album (Destroyer - only their second LP) wasn’t released in 2015. It’s been close to that since the last albums from Rhianna and Frank Ocean, to be fair, but where those cultural icons have kept themselves in the public eye Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais all but vanished, you could say, even before Destroyer was released. They never did seize their momentum either. And there’s plenty of patchy info about them that makes me think that Wikipedia has, just this once, got it wrong.

Here is some of that patchiness…

• Wiki doesn’t just have them as a current project – it says they started in 2009, which is in fact the year of their debut album, Dance Mother. It notoriously took too long to be released.

• When you ask Google “Are Telepathe still a band?” its AI returns a verdict of no. But it also doesn’t recognise Destroyer as ever existing, only their debut.

• Streaming has the opposite idea where the music is concerned: Dance Mother is nowhere to be found (presumably due to licensing red tape after it was released by 3 different labels), which is a shame because it’s the far more superior of the two albums. When I noticed that it wasn’t on DSPs a few years ago, I asked Twitter what that was all about and one user zipped up their mp3s of it for me. It’s since been ripped to YouTube.

  

Telepathe came up in the heyday of MySpace and Pitchfork, with other bloggerific, rhythm-heavy bands-who-like-electronics, like Animal Collective, Yeasayer, TV On The Radio and Gang Gang Dance. Originally they were very much on the Brooklyn experimental scene, making scratchy loops of drums, drones and very little vocals. That era of the duo was documented on their 2006 EP Farewell Forest – perhaps their best release, if markedly different to what eventually followed.

From then on they were the most hyped New York group for the next couple of years, less eager to please than nu ravers and more authentic in how they dressed (plus one of them was called Busy), but in the same pocket as Crystal Castles’ wrecking ball remix of ‘Crimewave’ by HEALTH, who were still in their early, unbeatable noise phase. You couldn’t dance to Telepathe’s newer mid tempo music like you could that song, but their track ‘Chrome’s On It’ was still played at every clubnight in every town, usually between live bands who were as mesmerised by it as anyone else.

‘Chrome’s On It’ is so good it IS on streaming platforms. It’s a tumble of stuttering beats inspired by 90s commercial hip hop, which Gangnes and Livaudais “oh, oh” and laconically half-rap over. The perfect amount of pop in their transition from avant-garde drone duo, it sounded like nothing else then and still does today. But it was endlessly rereleased on different bedroom labels and again once their debut was finally finished with the help of then-hot Dave Sitek: the song that wouldn’t go away, for good and band, inadvertently suggested this was the peak of what Telepathe could do. And so it turned out to be.

Their debut album came at least a year too late, in 2009, in a complicated 3-way deal that in the UK included a label (Co-Op/V2) that felt at odds with the 2 coolest women from the coolest borough of New York. MySpace had collapsed, bringing to an end a joyful and unique era of frivolous fandom on the Internet, nu rave had become embarrassing, everything had moved on. In our own Loud And Quiet cover feature with the group at that time, somewhat optimistically and lazily titled ‘Chrome’s Still On It’, Melissa Livaudais said: “Someone asked me, ‘are you going to strike while the iron is hot?’ But that’s not what we’re thinking about really, we’re just thinking about the finished product and that we want it to be in the right hands.”

There’s still more to Dance Mother than the song that came to define Telepathe. ‘Devil’s Trident’ (remixed a bunch of times on an earlier EP released by Merok Records, by peers like Teengirl Fantasy and Mi Ami) is the perfect skittish incantation, once again skilfully treading the line between electro pop and weirdo mantra; opener ‘So Fine’ swings more for Italo Disco, but not in a drab way; whilst more accessible than their earliest work, the whole album is a lot stranger and leas commercial than people said at the time.

It was years after the release of Destroyer (quite serviceable, like how Madonna’s new Confessions sequel is – similar in icy synth pop style too) that I realised Telepathe had released a second album. If you can imagine how cold the world went on the band between 2006 and their debut 3 years later, 2015 – 6 more years of not striking while the iron is hot – was evidently a ghostly landscape. It all adds to the riddle of Telepathe though, who now feel something like a mirage, having been so buzzed and certain for success. It fits the music (all of it, in fact), which always had an addictive spookiness of did-that-even-happen?