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Time.Space.Repeat.- Lost Transmissions

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If you joined the dots of Time.Space.Repeat.’s music you’d perhaps understand why they aren’t bigger than they are, but that wouldn’t make it any more just. The London shoegazers first full length album ‘Early Transmissions’ had its flaws certainly, but that merely emphasised it’s charm- a passionate, heart on sleeve skeleton’s out the closet personal collection of songs that managed to sound absolutely massive to boot.

The free download single (that’s also included here) ‘The End Of The World’ was perhaps the group’s best work yet; a bleak subject matter borne out warts and all sure, but one can only hope the real apocalypse will sound so good. And yet the mumblings and postings of the TSR and chiefly its lead man Sonic James Doom sound worryingly like a band on the retreat, with live performances restricted to acoustic shows and a series of other understandably affecting issues curbing the exposure that this band so surely deserve. ‘Lost Transmissions’ then could be the shoegazers final effort; a rounded up collection of studio recordings, the free downloads ‘The End Of The World’,'No Laces’, and live favourite ‘The Fear’.

If that is the case, and let us hope it’s not so, then ‘Lost Transmissions’ is a fine and fitting relic of a band who possess a great deal more talent than you sense they themselves believe they have. The obvious highlights to the album are the three previously mentioned tracks, hitting the senses one after another towards the album’s end. ‘No Laces’ starts sparsely, just a lone guitar and Doom’s slightly strained but earnest vocals drifting back and forth amongst the now steadily marching drum beat and roar of noise doing its best to engulf him. ‘The Fear’ then sinisterly slithers in and bases its defiance around the simple repetition of the lyric ‘I’m not scared‘; it’s a track of haunting bleakness as the tortured narrator accepts his own mortality, expecting to ’see it all turn to dust, I know I won’t be wrong’.

The ensuing four minutes is a thing of combined power and poignancy; you may have guessed by now that Time.Space.Repeat. don’t deal in the lyrical bread and butter of every day life, they’re looking onwards to the end, and whilst at times the feeling of apocalypse and despondency can get a bit too relentless, there’s still something positive in there; a defiance against that perhaps, a determination that what’s coming is coming but that’s no reason for us not to try and live our lives to the full. See following track ‘The End Of The World’ as an example: a six minute opus of which its title is pretty much self explanatory, and yet whose unstoppable rolling ball of a noise is completely uplifting and moving. Put simply it’s this album at its best.

The new stuff isn’t quite as strong but still good, with more of a balance between the out and out distortion-balladry of their singles and the slightly cleaner post rock side of their canon. It does at times feel a little like exactly what it is, a selection of studio recordings from the past two years with a couple of others tacked on; but in the likes of ‘Disaster Song’ and ‘Who Will Save Us Now’ the group show such a way around an instrumental melody as to easily hold their own against more recognised contemporaries like Explosions In The Sky. In fact the latter of those tracks offers some of the album’s happiest moments, a tempo quickening infectious intertwining of piano chords and winding guitar lines that builds up like a bubble inside you before gently being allowed to pop. Of their other lyrical inclusive efforts, ‘Youth Of America’ starts off rather like iLiKETRAiNS ‘We Go Hunting’ and turns attention away from the meaning of existence, issuing a rallying cry to America’s youth to help ensure that humanity’s population, for a bit longer at least, is assured.

It’s one of the group’s heaviest tracks to date with a slightly grungier feel albeit still one crafted inside a wind tunnel. ‘Under The Waves’ is a different concoction altogether, sparse by TSR standards it nevertheless deals with familiar existential themes as Sonic James Doom laments that ‘they say time’s a great healer but it’s time that we don’t have’. It’s listening to this song that you get the worrying sense of finality of things in TSR world as it sounds for all the world like a farewell statement, the vocal pleading for ‘one more day to say goodbye’ sounding forlorn and lost, simultaneously showcasing TSR’s honest, passionate spirit and also suggesting the idea that that same spirit may be about to be snuffed out.

Listen to ‘The Lost Transmissions’ with this warning; the subject matters are often bleak, and if the thought of an album concerning death and the expiration of time is a touch too much for the stomach take then this may not be for you. But for those who listen through, and see the craft in the lyrics, the sheer ambience of the noise surrounding and the overall light tinted power of the songs; this may be something very special for you indeed.