Telecom

In June 2005, a hot new quartet played to less than 10 people at Melbourne’s infamous Pony Bar. Four 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 four 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 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 saxophones; try-hard Beach Boys harmonies; inaudible drunken choirs; slide guitars fed through wahs; wahs fed through slides; new age percussion; delayed piano ala John Farnham’s ‘Age of Reason’; the drum sound from ‘Race for the Prize’; solos nicked from Green Mind; extreme Springsteen-isms; weighty lyrics about life, death and gay cowboys; and sharks shooting laser beams out of their fucking heads.
It’s outlasted several family members, one drummer, one manager and two long-term relationships. It’s overseen a wedding, five new jobs, 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 write about. To sell at Dixon’s. To incinerate. We don’t care. It’s yours and it’s done.
Prepare to Die. Think about it.