Search - Telefon Tel Aviv :: Fahrenheit Fair Enough

Flow and Meander

Raphael City | 02/03/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I noticed the previous reviews for this album were short and didn't tell enough. So I shall elaborate. This album is flavored towards IDM. Intelligent Dance Music. The sound is a mix of blibs and smooth atmosphere melded together by welders who are masters of their trade. This is an album that needs to heard as a whole. The sound flows and builds on itself through out the whole album, as if one is traveling a round trip. I've found I can put this album on repeat while working and not get tired or hearing the cd play over. This album is not background noise however, it is very well engineered beats that define a new step in electronic music. For a while I was afraid electronic might stagnate, but this album holds a promise for its continuence due to its evolutionary new concepts. Give this album your ear. You won't be disapointed."

Shiny

diana potts | Lambertville, NJ United States | 02/22/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"With their first record, 2002's Farhenheit Fair Enough, Joshua Eustas and Charles Cooper created a loyal fan base through touring and implementing the most useful instrument to any artist; word of mouth. Telefon Tel Aviv's elegant complexities of brash electronics combined with the duo's guitar and piano ambience came at a perfect time when down tempo was becoming predictable and the popular IDM sounds from the West Coast were slowly fading. Farhenheit's orchestrations allowed the listener to assign their own emotions, making it the foreplay to their second full-length album. With their second album, Map of What is Effortless, Eustas and Cooper mark their return with a palate that is significantly stronger and more assertive via forceful guitar chords and the addition of voice. If Fahrenheit Fair Enough was their foreplay, than Map of What is Effortless is clearly TTA's attempt to finish what they started. The vocals of Damon Aaron and Lindsay Anderson leave no question that TTA is ready to present a more visible and wider range of emotional highs and lows alongside their instrumental speak. The gentile creativity of Farhenheit still looms, however the duo explores more raw, frontal sounds as with, "What it is Without the Hand that Wields It", a track that is closer to the likes of Aphex Twin than the TTA previously known. The layers of heart wrenching simplistic guitar strokes, computerized crunches and dramatic vocals of 'What it was will never again' perfectly summarizes this album's overall strengths in an audio and characteristic context. The obvious audience favorite will be Effortless' first single, 'My Week Beats Your Year.' It's clap ridden rhythm back dropped into Anderson's popishly seductive vocals are enough to move hips and turn the heads of the music elite all in one spin. However, the dance fever of the single should not cloud what Eustas and Cooper are doing on the rest of this album. Sequentially laid out, the songs all lead to an emotional destination that is left for the listener to point towards. There is an obvious map of human emotion being drawn here; one that is much more dramatic, blatant accessible than that of Fahrenheit's. As with any achieved successor, Effortless takes the duo in a new and challenging path of keeping the auditory satisfaction interesting. If Effortless is the temperate foreplay's follow through, than Telefon Tel Aviv's love affair with us has just begun."