Telamor: Crush Review

By John Urtado
Music Journalist

Artist: Telamor
Album: Crush
Release Date: January 9th, 2018
Website: https://telamor.bandcamp.com/

Tom Hauck is a Boston rock veteran who has adopted the domain Telamor for his most recent project. Telamor is more or less a solo project of his where he plays guitar, bass, drums, and any other percussion parts, and has a friend of his named Warren Babson (a Grammy-nominated producer who has most notably done work for Justin Bieber and The Black Eyed Peas) producing his work. The genre that is given to us from Hauck is a bit of a classic rock mixed with some indie pop. Essentially, Hauck sounds like he was aiming for a Sex Pistols sound but replace their driving guitar with bar chord acoustic patterns instead.  For the work of Telamor, we are also given quite distinctive nasally vocal work that becomes very distinguishable from anything else being made today. It’s rather more comparable to the classic rock stuff as far as vocals go but the instrumental side has a different approach. Hauck was trying to keep a low profile for his Telamor project, as it was mostly made for him to share his new music with friends of his, but he has slowly gained a fan base from Telamor.

Crush has a dance tempo to the entire album. We hear a basic 4/4 rock beat from the drums and nothing else too musically complex from the guitars. Realistically, many of the songs sound the same which made it quite unimpressive. The lyrics themselves bring a punk elegance in terms of word usage, but the vocals aren’t very impressive. By stating this, I mean that the lyric work was very simplistic and the word choice seemed very adequate in that it seems the entire album was rushed to be done. Each song Hauck has a straight eighth note acoustic guitar over a more or less driving electric guitar that tries to provide more of a rhythm to the sound of the songs. The reasons for the songs being so simplistic and “dry” sounding is because Telamor wanted to go for that live real rock band sound. None of the work is meant to be overproduced for Telamor. If you enjoy that classic sounding rock band with very minimal production work this album may be worth a listen for you!

The song “You’re My Fire” was his smash hit from the entire album; it has a very generic song structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus. The chorus is him just singing, “You’re my fire, you light my way, I feel the heat, and now I’m saved.” Now imagine that being sung with a slightly nasally voice struggling to even hit pitches and stay in the key of song? Not very impressive at all. It sounds as if because he has trouble reaching the pitches while singing he has to strain his throat, which just makes the vocal work worse, as every song of the album sounds like this. Usually whenever I think classic rock I think of older bands anywhere from Led Zeppelin to Chicago even, and in my opinion many of the old classic rock singers didn’t sing very well at all. They try so hard to be aggressive in their sound that it ruins the overall tonality of their singing. Personally, the album was very adequate and I would definitely not recommend it to anyone as I myself had an extremely difficult time just listening to all of it.