Tellison

There is a habit today to ‘co-opt’ musical genres and call something that is, at a stretch, based on a musical genre by the same name. To whit: the modern form of music called R&B has almost nothing in common with Otis Redding or Sam & Dave and the Californian ‘punks’ don’t even come close to bands like the Jam or The Sex Pistols,

Here we have Tellison who are ostensibly an indie rock band from London but whose influences are far more Green Day or that ilk – if you are confused then that is fine because anyone whose musical memories are older than a few years is in the same bed.

More importantly though, Tellison are streets ahead of most of the purveyors of Cal-surf-punk link Blink 182 or Bowling For Soup and I would happily listen to them all night long.

‘Contact! Contact!’ was the bands debut album and it has had the remix and clean up treatment from the Naim team as well as a couple of extra tracks.
The music has plenty of power and passion but the remastering process has managed to bring the bass out of the mix and cleaned up the vocals. A few times the music bordered on psychedelic which I definitely do not remember from the original release and they have a slightly more whimsical air on numbers like ‘Fire’.
Stephen Davidson and Peter Phillips harmonise brilliantly and their twin guitar attack has tons of drive and aggro – all fuelled by Andrew Tickell on bass and Henry Danowski’s drums.

The original album had rave reviews and the band has hardly stood still in between times but this is well worth the re-issue if only because it reminds us that English lads (Londoners) can do Calisurfpunk better than the Yanks.