2006 has been admittedly a top year for music, ignore what the gloom mongers say, for me personally a week has yet to pass when I haven't heard something that has caused my head to turn, my jaw to drop and that electric spark (you know - the one that runs up your spine causing your hairs to stand on end) zap into action with such alarming frequency.

Album wise its been a pretty vintage year, preferences if preferences are needed would have me reflecting on full lengths from Vetiver, Welcome, Beatnik Filmstars, Magoo and FortDax - all immediately springing to mind (there are more - perhaps to numerous to note here but they know who they are and anyway you'd only think me anal) in their company a multitude of memories are locked ready to be rekindled by just the press of a play button. Yet for everything I've had the pleasure of hearing over the last 12 months - here and now I'll happily put my head on the block and say this - the third album from Australia's Telemetry Orchestra - is simply the finest and most enjoyable listening experience that's been my fortune to have had all year.

Why?

Well put simply its like having an album made up of the best bits of your record collection though for me personally it certainly would have been all the more complete with a spot of frenzied hardcore action but hey beggars can't be choosers.

Telemetry Orchestra hail from Sydney and number three in their ranks - two boys one girl and they have together crafted in the shape of 'Empire' a colourfully amorphic and kaleidoscopic odyssey of some measure that joins the delicately vague dots that exist between blissed out psyche ('Flicker'), down tempo lounge ('Miles Away' - or 'Hole in the Roof' which superbly manifests into a hazy mantra of 'Stupid Dream' era Porcupine Tree proportions), ethereal cosmic folk ('Face it now') and hook happy effervescent bubblegum pop ('Hazy Elevator'). Between the lilting grooves of these fourteen cuts 'Empire' shimmers, seduces and soars all at once elegiac, elegant and entrancing. 'Flicker' in particular is lushly tempting, psychedelically enhanced hypnotic waves caress the space age bachelor pad fluffiness of Charlotte Whittingham's softly seductive vocal before the onset of the locked down motorik grind comes to expand whatever vestiges of the mind that have escaped from being entranced by the swirling cosmic vibes throughout. While those of you much in need of your required intake of E6 kookiness may do well to hook up to the opening breezily lysergic space jangle pop motifs of the starry eyed 'Under the Cherry Tree' a kind of Dandy Warhols meets the High Llamas affair that's been left out and overcooked under a West Coast sun before mutating splendidly into the lazy eyed fuzz wonky ness of the oddball 'A pinch of distraction'.

'Empire' is an album that doesn't struggle to find you or you it - its fluent, spatial and rather than be beset by one specific groove prefers to, as it were, terra form and shift shape and dynamic so as to never dull - just check the contrast between the Spiritualized meets Monkees E6 fuzz buzzing pop of 'Hazy Elevator' and the simply adorable and lulling rustic interplays of 'Miles Away' itself paying a nod or two to the quieter moments found on Magnetaphone's criminally overlooked 'the Man who ate the man' full length from last year. To hear 'Empire' once is to be charmed by its almost unassuming spectral grace, to it hear it twice and the florescent spectrum begins to take shape and the hooks are already beginning to make their mark upon your psyche - the bewitching and exotic 'Face it now' is simply crushing sounding as it does like a Honoluluan shipping forecast dreamt up on a collaborative recording spree by Discordia and Toshack Highway . And just when you thought things couldn't possibly get any better the blighters go a throw the curve balling 'Inside (Watching)' to knock you off your listening pedestal for a spot of disarming cosmic candy pop that makes a pit stop at the milky way café where both Broadcast and Stereolab can be found chilling out and frantically exchanging admiring notes. Simply classy.

www.undercovermusic.com.au

Key tracks -
Flicker
Miles Away
Inside (Watching)
Hole in the Roof


MARK BARTON