Teleman look to leave their own mark on Good Time / Hard Time.
Somebody once said that the only thing you get for standing in the middle of the road is run over.
Increasingly, being a musician is a career made up of seemingly insurmountable barriers juxtaposed with a lack of control; it’s clear that almost nobody knows the special sauce that brings comfort and prosperity to it anymore.
Bands such as a Teleman have always seemed happily jammed in such a de-risked space, twisting synth pop and indie into Hot Chip-ish shapes for almost the last decade.
Good Time / Hard Time is their fourth album and the first since singer Thomas Sanders’ brother Johnny left to pursue other work in film and design.
Rather than dwell on the consequences of that or much else of the external chaos which has turned the world on its head, Teleman have chosen to set things in some kind of perspective, Sanders explaining: “You’ve got to experience the hard times to appreciate the good times in life. Most of the songs are about universal things everyone can relate to, the small and simple details about difficult connections and overcoming them.”
As much as that there’s a sense of mapping people’s growth – most especially on Trees Grow High, a song dedicated to outcasts who over time learn to rely on each other, realizing, ‘We never had a simple little life/Floods and hurricanes, slipping off the rails’.
Musically the now-trio’s influences haven’t diverged much from familiar staples – with maybe a Chic bassline here, hints of the alt-pop weirdness of early Metronomy there – although the odd chunkier guitar riff offers some ballast against the sin of being too lightweight.
Wonderful Times is a case in point, a track with punch that Sanders otherwise uses to remind us that the idea of progress is only a useful one if it benefits everyone, pointing out that, ‘Its chorus is deliberately dumb to offset the dark subject matter, sung by children to hammer home the irony’.
Trying to work through complicated ideas via simple music has, it’s been proved on many occasions, to be time wasted however and Good Time / Hard Time is mostly a story consciously built through brief chapters, one that that’s over in less than thirty-five bittersweet minutes.
It’s only towards the conclusion that Teleman allow themselves to stretch out a little, as if until the point that they begin The Girls Who Came To Stay there was a slight fear of escaping the bubble of pop’s hyper short attention span.
That’s suitably weird and interesting however, whilst the titular closer deals with the unwinnable war of navigating doomed relationships and has the feel of a group therapy session where everyone is encouraged to pick up an instrument at the end.
It takes some bravery to admit it, but over thinking can still weigh anyone down and it has to be said that the album’s peaks are still to be found in places where simplicity isn’t smothered.
In this category Cherish is that currently endangered species, an achingly sweet ballad, whilst The Juice is a lane Teleman occupy far too infrequently for their own good; slick, danceable and with an addictive chorus, it punches levels above its collective weight.
Perhaps this is Teleman’s best version of their future selves, a recognition that being something to someone yields better fulfillment than being stuck on anyone’s central reservation.
Good Time / Hard Time may well point the way.
