The 1981 Listening Post - Telefones - Rock-Ola

 Reviewed by Paul J Zickler

Released: July 25 1981 Telefones Rock-Ola Genre: New Wave / Ska / Power Pop Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Highlights: Brave New World Sports Automatic Man On August 6, 1982, R.E.M. opened for The Telefones at the Hot Klub in Dallas, Texas. Listening to Brave New World and Sports, the first two tracks on their sophomore LP, I get it. The high energy, 2-tone-ish new wave - edgy vocals, ringing guitars and thumping drums, punctuated with flugelhorn solos - would probably have connected more readily with many fans than the darker, murkier stuff Stipe and company were playing. And then song 3 comes in, kinda dark and murky. Automatic Man is a minor key, new wave protest against… robots? “He can do it better than you or I can He’s fully metallic Automatic Man.” The harmony vocals, scratchy chorus guitar, secret agent bass line, and legato horns keep this one moving along. Murky but catchy! Mon Cherie’s angular power pop sounds a bit like The Romantics, but also references “that old song by Ernie Tubb” and stretches the word “baby” out to five syllables. Stranger in a Strange Land uses a vaguely Middle Eastern tone to tell the tongue-in-cheek tale of a US soldier overseas: “It’s so hard makin’ conversation In a language you don’t understand And it’s real hell tryin’ to find a good rest’raunt You’re a stranger in a strange land.” The theme continues with Arabian Wars: “They’re calling it a holy war But why’s everybody so sore?” Lyrically interesting, but musically less so, other than the XTC-like guitar break that opens and closes the song. Radio Rebels is about soldiers of a different kind. The listener is urged to “twist around your dial ‘til you locate those radio rebels, and dig the sound.” It’s actually refreshing to remember indie radio from the early ‘80’s and how rebellious it seemed. It’s a fairly dull song, really, but the sentiment is great. Farmer’s Daughter incorporates a bit of Some Girls-era Rolling Stones into an infectious ska bop. Oddly, the flugelhorn player is less effective here, too front-and-center and not creative enough to pull it off. The guitars are great, as they are throughout the album, really. With a song titled Circles Under Sunshine, I should have expected some white reggae, but extending the album’s most boring track and calling it Circle Dub feels unfortunate. There’s some mumbled speech that turns out to be backmasking, but I didn’t play the record backwards to find out what it said. The Telefones were three brothers: Chris, Jerry and Steve Dirkx, and one other guy named Mark Griffin. Rock-Ola! was their second of two albums. It has its moments, just as the band did, before disappearing into the mists of time.