music

Telecom: Nick Roe, Coops, Gregory Erdstein and Darren Levin

Photo by Alice Foulcher
www.alicefoulcher.com.

In June 2005, a hot new quartet played to less than 10 people at Melbourne's infamous Pony Bar. Five years later, they've garnered rave reviews from the English press, played the most talked about South by Southwest showcase since Wolfmother, sold out Festival Hall in less than an hour, and have a song on the soundtrack of a major Hollywood picture. That band is The Temper Trap.

Despite headlining that bill, TELECOM have spent five years pissing away 'momentum', playing the odd gig to the odd punter and recording their debut LP at their extreme leisure. The result is Prepare To Die, an album pieced together over three years at three locations (Sing Sing South in South Yarra, a house in Richmond, and a flat in St Kilda East), on analog and digital equipment, with our dear friend Robbie Adams and an ARIA Award-winning engineer named Noam/Owen manning the desks.

It's got try-hard Beach Boys harmonies; inaudible drunken choirs; slide guitars fed through wahs; wahs fed through slides; delayed piano ala John Farnham's 'Age of Reason'; the drum sound from The Flaming Lips' 'Race for the Prize'; solos nicked from Dinosaur Jr.'s 'Green Mind'; extreme Springsteen-isms; weighty lyrics about life, death, and 200 frozen hamburgers.

It has outlasted several family members, one drummer, one manager, and two long-term relationships. It's overseen a wedding, five new jobs, numerous overseas 'holidays', a masters degree, two pregnancies and three side-projects. We've hated it. We've loved it. And now it's yours. To listen to. To cherish. To sell at Dixons. To incinerate. We don't care.

It's yours and it's done.