I’m compelled by two things to mention The Televangelist & the Architect, a band out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. First, the band contacted me directly and asked if I would take a listen and if I would encourage all of you to do the same. This happens rarely enough on Creekside that I can actually spend some time with the music each band sends.
The second thing, and the only reason I’m actually mentioning them now, is that their latest album–Diaries of the Intelligentsia–hasn’t left my rotation for a week.
As the band grows in popularity, the inevitable comparisons to Bright Eyes have been and will continue to be made. This is relatively accurate but also unfortunate. Rhythms, melodies, the intonation and shakiness in the singer’s voice, and a subject matter that dances between the exposure of others’ (our own?) hypocrisy and the doubt that we have any right to make these judgments–all of these admittedly feel at times a shadow of Bright Eyes (as on “Self-Propagating Mechanisms of Religion”), but also more mature and less bound by that formulaic approach (as on “The Unconscious Collective” or on “Stimulus Bound Behavior”).
As with most post-rock, the guitar work and song arrangements are also more Thurston Moore than Conor Oberst. Most of the time the songs on Diaries benefit from avoiding the verse-chorus / 3-chord HungryMan dinner of standard pop and indie rock. But when you hear the slow build at the beginning of “An Attempt at Qualification,” you long for a chorus to hang around the necks of the lovely guitars and patient drumming. But even this, as it moves into the context of the album’s closer, “The Convictions of the Convicted,” is easily forgotten under the rocking and the strings and the harmonies and even that opening Sabbath nod of a bass line. Stick around in that song for what I’m calling the bridge. Big pay-off to the song’s opening promise.
I think we can expect good things from The Televangelist & the Architect (though, not an easy acronym or initialism: The T & the A? Yikes). All the same, it’s nice to see bands couple a savvy marketing strategy with some talent, as well.
The whole album, Diaries of the Intelligentsia, is temporarily available for download at the band’s site. Toss it into your mix and see if it doesn’t keep rising to the top.
creekside.typepad.com
June 26, 2006