Tleary - "Mind Liberation Front"

Tleary - Juan & John (Dusty Skin 2007)

Tleary - Mind Liberation Front / Dusty Skin

A weekend to recover from everything that's been going on these past few weeks, that's what we needed here at Audiversity. A weekend to just take a step back from all the politics, all the money issues, all the legal wranglings and pressures of the real world and just listen to some fucking music. Yes. It wasn't quite Zombocom, but if it was, Tleary would be the perfect soundtrack to re-entering reality come Monday morning.

Sure enough, here we are and here, too, are Tleary. Who they are: Two guys from Sicily of all places. It's not too often you hear of Italian rock bands making it big but luckily Janpaolo Peritore and DJ Doc Trashz have done exactly that with a schizophrenic set of nine songs that will have you constantly guessing what's happening next.

There are scant few tunes that have been released this year more menacingly fun in the classic traditions of The Fall than "Juan & John," and that's just what opens this album up. This is what The Fall would sound like if... Well, if they were from Sicily and you could understand what he was saying about 5% more of the time. In other words, it's a deadringer in the best way. It's also a high-energy red herring: Take "Groundman" as an example and suddenly they sound more like a Pixies fronted by Mark E. Smith actually trying to sing. Very endearing in a way. The garage-like guitar tones are offset by DJ Doc Trashz's electronic addenda, and the bouncy indie-pop breakdown in the middle of "Groundman" isn't the only example of Tleary showing multiple personalities in the same song. It's par for the course, in fact... But these crunchy aluminum guitar sounds we keep talking about aren't just something they happened upon; working with them for this album is Josh Bonati, who has worked with Fred Kevorkian and Michael MacDonald. The White Stripes and Iggy Pop are two of the artists the band lists as examples of their work, so there you see the connection to garage. "Ghost Worm" is another great example of these sounds meeting a champion Italian DJ's sonic switchbacks.

But wait, it's not that simple either. "Hi" is "the ballad," but it's one you just don't see coming in all its stripped-down, understated simplicity. More than I expected, "Hi" is a spaghetti western excerpt brilliantly placed right in between a moody instrumental that would've worked for Marcus Schmickler and Hayden Chisholm ("Prickly Pear") and a 90s Italo-porn laced with grunge ("Porn Jazz"). Like, groovy. Even Peritore's high-pitched snarl can't disguise that this is some pretty salacious stuff.

In the best traditions of musical collagists and fuck-your-track-sequence sequencers, "Life" returns to the acoustic simplicity of "Hi" but with more a backporch Americana feel than a frontporch Catania. "Z" ends on an electro-acoustic near-glitch note indicating no indication whatsoever as to where this band will be heading next. It's erratic, it's vibrant, it's wildly inconsistent. It's also a great reason to wake up on Monday mornings. If variety is the spice of life, Tleary are surely the habanero peppers of rock's Scoville rating. Mind Liberation Front urges you to join them in freeing yourself of the ideas of predictability, of consistency, of boredom. Just one song isn't enough and, at this rate, just one album isn't enough either. We need reinforcements on the front. Tleary have arrived to deliver.