Thelemáticos, ThelemáticosDiscoteca Oceano, Spain
Rating: 59
By Jean-Stephane Beriot
“En tu mundo raro solo existes tu,” this line sums up the latest band from Discoteca Oceano (El Guincho, Joe Crepusculo, Linda Mirada), this band from Barcelona is equally appealing and very fitting to the label’s tropipop premise, the music itself, unfortunately not as exciting. Thelemáticos makes weird but cohesive music, their debut is an ethereal set of songs that would qualify as meticulously risky. What I’m saying is that the band is standing in one leg, seeming to acknowledge its flaws, for those of us not circulating around their radar it’s pretty damn difficult to figure out if that acknowledgement is a quality or an unresolved crack.
I’ve pretty much established Thelemáticos as one really hard album to get through, but if you are chasing the sun, this might just be the answer to accompany your sunny ecstatic summer. They sound adventurous in “El Regalo” or “El Castillo”, but don’t go as far as El Guincho or Extraperlo to actually explode their tropical bravura. The band leaded by Sergio Perez (collaborator of El Guincho and Joe Crepusculo) sounds better in the very mystic, almost reflective moments like “Adios” and “Al Final del Arcoiris,” two celestial pieces that should’ve been the path to follow for the rest of the disc.
Thelemáticos is an album of ideas more than anything else; sometimes these ideas are well executed, sometimes they’re deeply harmful. The most significant proposal from their brainstorm comes in the album’s structure. There are 14 tracks, not one of them longer than 2 minutes and 33 seconds. Trying to pick up most of the songs becomes a thorny practice, pleasant only for those with patience. The same way the truly good songs feel like they’ve been sliced prematurely. The songs’ short existence wouldn’t be a problem if they were nearly as good as Piyama Party’s “Fan de Carcass”, then we would be talking about a masterpiece.