Huh?  Wha?  Sometimes musicians think a little too hard about their music.  Can't you hear it?!  This is totally a symbolic representation of fractal math, the way the tempo moves with the 5/4 guitars and the singing has that acid rock thing and the...  Shut the hell up.  Often, what comes off as a clever, thematic masterpiece is really just a big, rotting fish covered over with fancy herbs and spices.  It's easy to see why artists fall into this symbolic rumination-disease from time to time, it provides them with a way to pretend what they're doing is actually good in substance.  Psi Corps is a side project of some Russian chick who's played around with a number of bands.  Tekeli-li is the band's debut, and it should have been their swansong from the sound of it.  Make that an albatrosssong based on the theme.

Tekeli-li is based on the Edgar Allen Poe novel about Arthur Gordon Pym.  It's the only novel he really finished, and for some reason Russians have always been obsessed with his work; probably because it's just as depressing as the stuff their authors vomited for awhile.  Briefly, A.G. Pym stows away on a whaling ship and then goes through a variety of ocean adventures.  It apparently influenced guys like Jules Verne, who is actually cool as shit, but that's probably just a way to give Poe scholars something else to masturbate over.  Psi Corps decided to make a "soundtrack" for the novel, so for the one of you out there that read it, maybe it will mean something, but most likely not.  Soundtrack is here a misnomer.

Tekeli-li actually starts out interesting with 'Party at Barnard's (Is Over)'.  The guitar work is reminiscent of 70s cartoon fantasy like Wizards or Heavy Metal.  That's kind of cool, but the childish keyboards keep it from really developing.  It's not a bad song per se, it's just that after this things go down into the depths with the white whale.  The atmosphere of the keyboards and other instruments is entertaining, but the guitars continuously shove a spear right in the belly.  Simply put, they don't seem to know what the hell their purpose is.  They chug, twiddle, doodle, daddle, but never pull anything substantial together that makes sense amongst the rest of the music.  Sometimes the drums pick it up and drive it forward, but the guitars promptly kill their momentum with a dose of nonsense.  Track four for example, 'Tsalal', starts out promising with an awesome keyboard sweep, but then again we're lead into what-the-hell land where the guitars can never seem to figure out what's going on.  Since the novel this was based on is known for not making any fucking sense, perhaps this was intentional.  A soundtrack for drunk whalers in the late 1800s?  Congratulations, you did it.  Wait, what?

Tekeli-li, in terms of musical genres, has some late 70s prog-rock going on, some early 80s electronic jazz, some ambient, whatever, it never joins very well anyway.  The artwork is cool, and really, it's a respectable idea to try to take a text and make a soundtrack out of it, but this possibility is lost at the hands of mediocre musicians.  Tekeli-li wants to desperately brood over itself, but the further you go, the more you see it just really doesn't have a clue what it's about.  The keyboards go from atmosphere to early video game cheese, the guitars mess around like it's a practice session, and the drums go from groove to randomness without any reason behind it.  Really, Alisa would have done good to totally drop the guitarist, because the rest of the music could have stood on its own without any of it.  And that, my friends, is how you know the guitar lines truly suck.  This album had potential, but this potential would have taken another couple of years to reach fruition, just like Pym's slow development into a man or whatever the hell is going on.  It seems Psi Corps wanted to jump in our face and scream 'hey look at us' without having much to say after that.  Cast this one out to sea and hope it lands somewhere in the arctic so no one finds it for a few thousand years and it goes all 'The Thing' on them.

Bandcamp

Written by Arkus

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