The Heat Of The Night - Telepathe

It was hot inside The Smell. The small rock club that shares an alleyway with that paragon of air conditioning, The Edison, has a way of heating up. It was so hot that my camera lens fogged up uncontrollably. It was so hot that unbuttoning most of the buttons on my shirt seemed like a reasonable idea.

The Smell's patrons, a mix of shorter-than-average flannel-wearers, didn't do much in the way of dancing on this past Saturday, June 14th, though that might not be attributable to the heat as much as the on-again, off-again fashion of dancing. That night, with a triple-header lineup of Nite Jewel, Abe Vigoda, and Telepathe, dancing seemed decidedly out.

Certainly it didn't help that the night's big name, Brooklyn's Telepathe, is a fundamentally cool band. You could play their music at full blast in a vodka bar for an hour and none of the ice would melt. Part of this is owed to the vocal harmonies shared between the group's founding members, Melissa Livaudais and Busy Gangnes, which have been compressed, condensed, and (can't avoid it) chilled just south of Ladytron.

But that's not to say that Telepathe is, as the nameplate of their electronic contemporaries suggest, music for robot women. There's a definite life to it - a clattering, beating heart that suggests the youth of the artists. If the all-ages crowd at The Smell looked like they were all breaking curfew, the band on stage somehow looked even younger.

And that is just how it should be - a young band playing cool music in what will likely go down as the hottest club in Los Angeles.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine