Album Review: The Telescopes - Halo Moon (Tapete Records)

Stephen Lawrie, the longstanding mind behind The Telescopes, has yet to pursue easy listening. With Halo Moon, his band’s seventeenth album, he lures us back into his brooding, ecstatic soundworld but tunnels through decades of psychedelic, shoegaze, and drone experimentations. On Friday, November 8, Lawrie and the British pioneers will debut in Bucharest at Control Club.

The early records of The Telescopes were driven by an interest in noise rock, psychedelia, and shoegaze, particularly seen in Taste (1989) . Following a hiatus, Lawrie returned with Third Wave (2002), an album that marked a shift into ambient and noise territory. This genre-blending approach has only deepened on Hidden Fields (2015) and Stone Tape (2017). Halo Moon feels like a culmination of this evolution. Its grounding in blues-inspired minimalism and use of reverb-laden textures echo the darker tones explored in Stone Tape but with a greater sense of restraint. This sense of somberness gives Halo Moon its unique resonance.

“Shake it all out,” Lawrie intones as the album opens with a gritty, submerged blues influence buried under layers of fuzz. The drums drag, underscoring Lawrie’s talent for slowing down time itself, letting each note hover and decay in a ritualistic cadence.

Other tracks, like Come Tomorrow and For the River Man, contrast the album’s brooding tone. Come Tomorrow features Lawrie drifting between calm and intensity (“No more weeping, no more sorrow, come tomorrow, we’ll rise again”). With For the River Man, we slip back into darkness, this time tinged with blues, where a piano line flickers and Lawrie’s voice pulls us ever-closer into a contemplative trance.

The slow-burning This Train Rolls On may be the album’s most intense yet stripped-back moment. The song embodies simmering violence, with sparse, metallic beats clanking through the background. Each measure presses against the limits of patience itself. There’s a hint of early Swans, but Lawrie allows the darkness to creep rather than crash.

Listening to Halo Moon is a practice in immersion. It is an experimental album that exists on its own terms—a private universe forged from drone, grit, and shimmering beauty. In shadow, it waits. For those willing to submerge, it offers a strange solace—a pursuit of transcendence over mass appeal, an invitation to lose yourself in a darkness that, somehow, never feels empty.