One of the best projects happening in the world right now is called Tereshkova, and it comes from the mind of Portlander Jeff Lane. Hot on the heels of last year’s outstanding Intergalactic Letdown tape, Lane’s new work keeps all the project’s soul-swallowing qualities — the oceans of reverb, the flipping and twisting electronic effects, and yards of delaying tape. But there’s something about this new album that gives even further access into the true genius of Tereshkova. There’s a sharper attack of melody and rhythm, picked guitars, plucked synths, and the drums just groove. But the important thing is that you really hear it all out in front this time, unburied, slicing through the fogs and ahead of the clouds of color left behind. Before I was thinking along twee lines, but now I’m getting straight psych pop, the kind Dave Fridmann loves to get his hands on. In either case, Tereshkova’s knack here is for that big symphonic sound, hurling the arranging prowess of people like Brian Wilson into the world of pedal power and monster amplifiers, and doing it with really pretty, understated songs. Lane builds little worlds of drifting, pastoral choral harmonies from his wash of guitar and synth; Some of the tunes, as they slip and strip their complications, blossom and bloom out into full on hymns resulting in some of the most massive music to hit a cassette yet this year. It’s all happening at the bottom of the Grand Canyon; a quiet, private and lonely moment, shouted up through the miles of earth and out into the heavens.
I do want to take a second to talk about the vocals. One issue is that it’d be tough to pick out even a handful of real words he’s actually singing, there’s just barely anything human left from the time the voice enters the mic to get out on the other end of a speaker. Trust, it’s a really great treated sound, and definitely the right amount of fucked-up for the music that surrounds it. It’s properly mixed in the bath, and Lane’s delivery also has the right attitude in its nasally sneer. But with the intonation a little eschewed, sometimes it gives a pale, irregular sort of feeling. This is almost more like a precautionary description here, there’s a lot of people that actually prefer words are delivered that way (and admittedly I’m one of them at times, here especially). Still, you gotta wonder what an angel might do with that kind of sonic real estate.
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