Tel Aviv - Tel Aviv

Incisive guitar strokes resolving in odd cadences and mumbles recorded in a Steve Albinian fashion project me into a quietly desperate era of unplugged sessions on TV, and more precisely into that one episode of Breakfast Time of July 1995, during which Elliott Smith uncannily performs "Clementine" in front of a bunch of Fox presenters and  a puppet. Released on TeenBeat, a label founded by Washington DC's alternative veteran Mark Robinson (of Unrest and Air Miami fame), Tel Aviv's self-titled album is in a permanent state of grace, even when it departs from its minimal ballad formula, like with the gritty "I Like Your Style" or the abstract "Ready-Mades". 

After a very beautiful - perhaps more pleasant but certainly less visceral - second album (taking cues from turn-of-the-century electronic indie pop, like Shinkansen Records and other post-Field Mice stuff, rather than Slint), Andrew Comer went on to release music as Prosaics, one of the many Joy Division-inspired and Matador-released (not very good) indie sleaze bands of the mid-00's, followed by a better dark indie folk project, Bloody Amateur in 2013 (also on TeenBeat), but nothing that’d reach the same ragingly candid heights of his 1995 debut. A perfect display of teenage spleen, anger and angst, making its point as effortlessly as Gregg Araki's Doom Trilogy. (VG+/VG+)