This is for Selekta.com. It's unedited. Excuse the
dust as my writing is rusty. I know it's not
"detroit"...but I do know this album was discussed
here when it came out.

In that regard, it's taken me a while to get the
courage to post it here.

i wear a helmet.
d

Telefon Tel Aviv
Map of What is Effortless
Hefty

With their first record, 2002's Farhenheit Fair
Enough, Joshua Eustas and Charles Cooper created a
loyal fan base through touring and implementing the
most useful instrument to any artist; word of mouth.
Telefon Tel Aviv's elegant complexities of brash
electronics combined with the duo's guitar and piano
ambience came at a perfect time when down tempo was
becoming predictable and the popular IDM sounds from
the West Coast were slowly fading. Farhenheit's
orchestrations allowed the listener to assign their
own emotions, making it the foreplay to their most
recent endeavor. 

With their recent album, Map of What is Effortless,
Eustas and Cooper mark their return with a palate that
is significantly stronger and more assertive via
forceful guitar chords and the addition of voice. If
Fahrenheit Fair Enough was indeed their foreplay, than
Map of What is Effortless is clearly TTA's attempt to
finish what they started. The vocals of Damon Aaron
and Lindsay Anderson leave no question that TTA is
ready to present a more visible and wider range of
emotional highs and lows alongside their instrumental
speak. The gentile creativity of Farhenheit still
looms, however the duo explores more raw, frontal
sounds as with, "What it is Without the Hand that
Wields It", a track that is closer to shadows of Aphex
Twin than the TTA previously known. The layers of
heart wrenching simplistic guitar strokes,
computerized crunches and dramatic vocals of 'What it
was will never again' perfectly summarizes this
album's overall strengths in an audio and
characteristic context. 

The obvious audience favorite will be Effortless'
first single, 'My Week Beats Your Year.' It's clap
ridden rhythm back dropped into Anderson's popishly
seductive vocals are enough to move hips and turn the
heads of the music elite all in one spin. However, the
dance fever of the single should not cloud what Eustas
and Cooper are doing on the rest of this album. There
is an obvious map of human emotion being drawn here;
one that is much more dramatic, blatant and accessible
than that of Fahrenheit's. Sequentially laid out, the
listener is lead to an emotional direction that is
still left for them to conclude; it truly is what the
album calls itself. As with any achieved successor,
Map of What is Effortless takes the duo in a new and
challenging path of keeping the auditory satisfaction
interesting. If this is the temperate foreplay's
follow through, than Telefon Tel Aviv's love affair
with us has just began.



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