The Telescopes - Stone Tape (Reissue)

Stephen Lawrie has steered his telescope through numerous musical paths, from shoegazing noise mongering (1989’s debut Taste) to brain snapping auditory destruction (this year’s earlier release, Exploding Head Syndrome, an apt description of the terror within), but this is my favourite incarnation so far – dreamy, navel-gazing psychedelia with the smell of incense and other sweet aromas filling the air. [There’s a reason fans have dubbed it Stoned Tape!] Originally released in a limited vinyl edition of 500 on Italian imprint Yard Press which we reviewed two years ago, Cold Spring have polished it off for this CD edition and added a 14-minute live bonus track that makes their best release even better.

Opener ‘Become The Sun’ is a droning, chant-inducing head nodder that feels like an old Spacemen 3 outtake, ca. The Perfect Prescription, and sets the scene for an evening of modern mellow marshmallow music for heads everywhere. The trance continues throughout ‘The Speaking Stones’, so just keep calm and carry on if your rock garden starts speaking to you in tongues that even Liz Fraser wouldn’t understand.

There’s a dirgey, mournful Joy Division funeral march through the iceberg slow ‘The Desert In Your Heart’, and ‘Everything Must Be’ is even quieter, delving into Eno’s ambient period. Those helicopter blades slicing through ‘Silent Water’ eventually yield to a repetitive loop of organic strumming and humming before Lawrie breaks out the razor blades for some eardrum-slicing guitar pyrotechnics.

The 15-minute live bonus track, ‘The Living Thing’ was recorded in Switzerland last year and is something like a cross between a shamanic tribal drum circle and Spacemen 3’s Dreamweapon (aka An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music) tossed into a bubbling brew of Bardo Pond, Jesus and Mary Chain and your Brian Jonestown Massacre copy band of choice. So if you’re constantly whining that they don’t make good drug music to take drugs to make music to take drugs to anymore and rue the heyday of Spacemen 3 and Brian Jonestown Massacre, pick this up and quit complaining: your protests (and brain) will be shortly put to rest.