Test Tone Channel - Running for Words
(Matlock)
Hey, remember the 90s? Remember back in the early 90s when My Bloody
Valentine was one of the best bands in the world. Of course, as with
every successful British band from the Beatles onward, America had to
have its answers to My Bloody Valentine. Unfortunately, the most popular answer was
Velocity Girl. What the hell were we thinking? The Brits give us My
Bloody Valentine, and the best we can come up with is Velocity Girl
who (no offense intended as there are worse bands) was just a standard
indie pop band who just happened to use a couple fuzzy, shoegazing
atmospherics at the beginning of their career.
Test Tone Channel reminds me quite a bit of Velocity Girl, and, again,
no offense is intended by that. The band is taking the
style of fairly groundbreaking work and adapting it to standard
pop songwriting with cutesy boy/girl singing. Just as Velocity Girl borrowed
Kevin Shields' fuzzy guitar swirl and made it American by adapting it to
the persona of Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica, Test Tone Channel borrows
post-rock's steady, reinforced, and unshakeable rhythms and adapts that
into something more blandly suburban-American.
Just as with Velocity Girl, the songs that suburbanization creates are not
without their charm. In fact, this album would be much less resistible if it
didn't suffer from having one painfully awful and amateurish song. With barely
30 minutes to make an album, Test Tone Channel hides near the end of the album,
"To Activate," a song made entirely from the preprogrammed sounds of a Casio
Tone Bank keyboard. The Tone Bank has been used before to make decent music
(see Trans Am's first album), however, here it just wreaks of amateurism,
tainting the first impression of the band and album.
Take that song away, a few tossed-together B-sides, and a couple other
presliced keyboard tricks, and the album can even be enjoyable. The better
songs here combine attractive male/female vocals, repetitive, swirling guitar
and keyboard melodies, and solid rhythms that deftly switch tempo. These
better songs show that the band can take elements from an artform that can be fairly
cold and sterile and infuse them into plain old pop music to make something as
warm as plain old pop but of higher quality.
In another time (say, the early 90s), Test Tone Channel would have released
the best four songs of this album over 2 really great Quickspace-like-kraut-filled 7"s, allowing the band
to feel the power of reaching past their hometown of Moncton while still
not forcing them to write an entire album's worth of material. Unfortunately,
this isn't the early 90s, and with the high cost of 7"s and low cost of CDs,
Test Tone Channel has given us a somewhat average 30 minute album in Running for
Words. The band shows some good ideas, but not enough to fill 30 minutes.
Chances are their next album will show a bit more of their vision and a bit
less of their Ross Geller-esque keyboard virtuosity and other time fillers.
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