The Telescopes – Hidden Fields

★★★

The British psychedelic band’s eighth album is a flurry of distorted noise, with a stomping beat edging itself out of the maelstrom once in a while.  It’s nothing to write home about – it certainly holds no candle to Lightning Bolt’s excellent Fantasy Empire – but it serves a certain niche purpose for those who are incapable of listening to anything that isn’t clipped out into the red for miles.  They’re very good at what they do, but what they do isn’t that much different from the psych-noise back or from their own material.  Each track functions in largely the same way:  a wash of noise, some guitar-borne feedback, drums and maybe the whispers of some words out of the fog before they duck quickly back under again.  The tempo is kept to the lumbering side of the dial, and while they’re all effective stompers they never deviate from it, and thus by the time the fifteen minutes of “The Living Things” has finished, boredom has set in.  Decent enough stuff, but largely inessential.