The Telepathic Butterflies

Album Review

Every now and then a band comes from out of nowhere and makes a record that leaves you stunned. You wonder why you never saw it coming: Where is the hype, the hoopla, the Hives-esque promotional push? One surmises that when a band comes from a non-musical hotbed like Montreal and records for a teeny tiny label, they are most likely bound to be unheralded. Well, consider this the hoopla, the trumpeting, and the shouting from the rooftops. This is a great record! A really great record! If you like rock & roll music with hooks, guts, and emotion, you really should give the Telepathic Butterflies' 2000 album Nine Songs (there are actually 12!) a listen. To make it easier for you, here are some touchstones: the Kinks; the Creation (and other great British psych bands like the Move and John's Children); Donovan (whose "Epistle to Dippy" they cover in smashing style); the Records; Guided by Voices before they hit a real studio; the Elephant Six bands like the Apples in Stereo, only minus the whimsy; and Sloan. These are all bands who wrote great songs and delivered them with a minimum of fooling around, and that is what the Telepathic Butterflies do. From the first track, the bouncing and joyous "All Very Hoopla," to the last, the duo of Jacques Dubois on drums and Rejean Ricard on guitars, bass, and vocals plays one nugget after the next in charming and powerful lo-fi fashion. The only downside to so many top-notch songs is that, other than the leadoff track, none of the tracks really stand out. Still, it is a very strong record and an amazing debut. You must track Nine Songs down. It is one of the best rock records of the young decade. [In early 2003 pop underground label Rainbow Quartz made it much easier to get ahold of the Telepathic Butterflies' music. They reissued Nine Songs, retitled it The Telepathic Butterflies, and added four new tracks. The four songs were recorded in 2002 and feature a new bass player, Eric Van Buren. The songs are marginally more hi-fidelity but not enough so to sound out of place with the original album's production. They are certainly no letdown quality-wise either. "A Final Word" is a delightfully peppy Byrdsian romp. "Radio Darlings" is a melodically vicious attack on bad bands ("Beautiful boys, smiling toys like the puppets on a string"). The new tracks make a great record even better. Now that the album is more readily available, you really have no excuse not to check it out.]