New York based guitar rock band Telescreens have never released an album under an hour, but their third LP, Why The Lights Flicker, beats their own record, clocking in at ninety-seven minutes. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Telescreens specifically by any means, but I am a fan of shreddy, grimy, night-out-in-New-York-City guitar rock. I’ll allow it to be derivative if it whips, and a handful of Telescreens songs do, in fact, whip. But this is not the kind of band that I ever find myself craving an hour-plus of music from. Perhaps I was naive to think that the world of indie rock still valued the album format and was immune to the stream-juicing strategy of stuffing your LPs with as many songs as possible, going for quantity over quality. I listened to Telescreens’s latest data dump, and in lieu of a traditional album review, I made a list of thirty things one could do in the 97 minutes it’d take to listen to Why The Lights Flicker:
1) Watch the 2023 action thriller film 97 Minutes starring Alec Baldwin, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and MyAnna Buring
2) Go to two therapy sessions
3) Listen to Nirvana’s studio album In Utero and live album MTV Unplugged in New York
4) Watch every deleted scene from Nirvanna the Band the Show
5) Meditate for long enough to reach Nirvana, maybe
6) Listen to the new YHWH Nailgun album eight times
7) Go to a three-band bill hardcore show (maybe four, if they all keep it really short and sweet)
8) Listen to two and half of the three new Drake albums
9) Watch an episode of Saturday Night Live, plus a cut-for-time sketch or two
10) Take a bubble bath
11) Listen to about ⅓ of a Bandsplain episode
12) Watch Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery
13) Take the Metro North from Grand Central to Beacon, New York (which Paste associate editor Casey Epstein-Gross and I did when we attended Black Country, New Road’s show at Storm King last weekend)
14) Listen to Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet 2.5 times
15) Cook this delicious-looking breakfast casserole
16) Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge three times
17) Play a game of Monopoly
18) Listen to Pinkpantheress’s remix album Fancy Some More? followed by the Four Tet remix of “Illegal”
19) Watch WALL-E
20) Go to the dentist for a deep clean and a couple fillings
21) Listen to the first five Joyce Manor albums
22) Watch these two Vine compilations
23) Read an Annie Ernaux novella
24) Listen to Tierra Whack’s Whack World six times, plus two or three of the standalone singles that followed
25) Watch half a season of Derry Girls
26) Wash and dry a load of laundry
27) Listen to Telescreens’ best song, “Phone Booth,” thirty-two times
28) Listen to LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening (which contains “All I Want,” the song interpolated on the aforementioned “Phone Booth”) and then listen to the two Tom Sharkett edits of “Home”
29) Listen to the first two Strokes albums and think about how if you’re gonna be a Strokes ripoff band, you should keep your records to forty minutes tops (and even that is pushing it)
30) Read the Penguin Classics edition of Ovid’s Fall of Icarus to yourself myself of the last time someone showed such an outrageous degree of hubris
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.pastemagazine.com ’
