BrightestYoungThings: LiveDC: Telefon Tel Aviv @ DC9

all words: Aaron Baird (so good to have him be back in the writing saddle)
all (lovely) photos: Ben Droz

It's so difficult to write about genuine sentiment without feeling genuinely sentimental.

Telefon Tel Aviv is/was a group of two. Two men that made music, I think beautiful music at times, who were particularly committed to an exceptionally crafted, mood-driven electronic form of ambient pop. I think that's probably the best way to put it. Which is really the thing. Aside from their vision and execution, how best to put it that
one of those two men died? Tragically, even -- the very week their album was released. It's tough.

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And that's genuine. That's a reality. That is something that one may want to skip quickly through when constructing a review of their show. I kind of do. But to play down the weight of that reality would ignore the seriousness with which their music is put forth. This isn't camp, nor theater. This is music of sentiment: of considerable pathos. The
crazy thing is that the mood is so pervasive and significant, well, it's difficult to neglect it. More difficult to criticize it.

Watching Telefon Tel Aviv "perform" these songs was provoking. The fact that Joshua Eustis managed to muster enough... well... enough something to play songs he had created with his longtime musical partner was impressive. Honestly, surprising even.

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He pulled them off, logistically, with a couple of mixing boards, a few keyboards, some pedals, the veritable macbook pro, and a new traveling musical compatriot: an old friend. He pulled them off, viscerally, with layered strato-soundscapes of distorted strings, heavily tempered vocals, buzzing bits of k(org)reated synth bass, heavy-hitting, almost (almost) danceable drum thumps, and another traveling companion: the memory of an old friend.

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The music, while complex, left nothing to be revealed: if it stands, it stands on its own. This was more recital than spectacle as the group never strayed far from the minute integrals that aggregate as songcraft on their recorded work. Tense, disparate, and even dramatic, the mood was unavoidable and pervasively melancholic. On a night
sprinkled with light rainfall and melodrama, my capacity for the reasonable had slithered away.

And I genuinely loved it.

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