REVIEW | Tele Novella Poet's Tooth
One of the really difficult pills for me to swallow in my adult life has been not being around music as much. Or rather, not being around new music. I feel like the majority of my development occurred during highschool, and since then, I’m mostly reliant on the things I’ve discovered to hold me over until something hits me at my flank that I can’t shake off.
Does anyone remember blogspots? This is one of my favorite early internet quirks that I recall with great fondness. So my friend Sean, who was very much my music guru at the time, showed me how to find music. Basically, you would go on google images, and you would search a band that you like along with the search term “blogspot” and if you wanted you could add “download” or “descagar,” and you would find these blogs by music enthusiasts who would go absolutely ham on compiling bands by genre, taste, mood and historical moments. That’s how I found all of my early punk music, folk, screamo, ambience and more.
The most vivid memory I have of this era was first discovering Modest Mouse and downloading This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, and when the song Ionizes & Atomizes came on, shivers ran up my spine and along my arms, my hair standing on its tippy toes as I said to myself, “So this is what music can be?”
Anyhoo, that’s all to say I’m very pleased to be discovering music again, slowly by surely. The last artist I got really into was the crooning of Matt Maltese, but in this post, I wanted to highlight my recent listening of the band Tele Novella. The way I found them was curious, because I happened to follow the director of one of their music videos online and I kept seeing these wild visuals for their song “Eggs in One Basket” embedded below.
Tele Novella is a band from Lockhart, Texas, and it absolutely shows. There is a patient desert feeling I get from a lot of songs on their latest album Poet’s Tooth that conjures images of wandering wranglers with many allusions made to the Western genre in songs like “Broomhorse,” “Vampire Cowgirl,” and especially with the instrumentation and visuals of “Funeral.”
As a huge fan of Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads, I love being able to put on a full album that transports me to another time and place. It can make simple errands like going to the groceries or commuting feel like an adventure. Even the videos have this vintage grainy quality about them that reminds me of old movies from the sixties. I’d be surprised to learn that they aren’t shooting on actual film cameras because of how compelling and natural their retro aesthetic appears to me. Even if it is a filter or a LUT with a scratchy overlay, I find it incredibly effective, and like I mentioned earlier, the videos were very much my introduction to the band.
I think my favorite aspect I’ve noticed is simply the quality of the lead singer’s singing. Natalie Ribbons’ voice has a playful direct quality to it, with an ability to somberly croon while feeling tinged with humor and irony. My partner commented that it sounds like she’s looking right at you when she’s singing, which I strongly agree with. And there’s a lot of opportunities in their music where her voice will sort of break into other notes. It almost reminds me of yodeling. And the lyrics are full of really strong imagery, such as the beginning of Broomhorse, “Before you go throwing in the towel, Let’s try singing louder than our stomach’s can growl, The china doesn’t match but you can’t tell, by candlelight oh, we didn’t pay the electric bill again.”
Checking out their Bandcamp, they describe their sound as “classic and sincere” as it’s “slowly processed through a loner medieval-tonk machine and then captured on cassette 8-track.” Knowing how silly they can be in interviews and in describing themselves, I wonder if the medieval-tonk machine is a fabrication. When asked how the band met in an Austin music festival interview, Ribbons replied that they all attended a town meeting and got into a heated debate regarding the font sizes used on local signage. But then again, I can absolutely imagine that cassette recording as being a part of their mastering process.
One thing I do know is that they describe their latest record, Poet’s Tooth, well when they say it “steers the duo’s whimsical western-tinted balladry in fascinating new directions.”
Highly recommend giving these guys a listen. Would absolutely love to see them perform live.
