“I hate you all / you smell like borrowed ideas” – This is the opening salvo of Canadian singer-songwriter Martin Tielli’s Operation Infinite Joy.
An album that, on reflection, I cannot recommend highly enough. These are songs that exhibit by turns theatrical pomp and delicate musing. Tielli has a multifarious camp icon of a voice, showcased as Beauty On‘s detuned piano reminisces on the scale of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody – bar a pretty xylophone and handclaps, this is all that structures the about-faces from bathos to boogie. Tremendous stuff.
The instrumentation swells for OK by Me, ripping-off a phrase from Dig a Pony by The Beatles, but doing such progressively interesting things with it that idea of sacrilege does not occur at all. The Temperance Society Choir and Sergeant Kraulis are reminiscent of Queen, Bowie, Yes and more excesses and digressions of 70s prog-rock joyously abound. The average track length on the album is about five and half minutes, but the songs never settle just long enough to catch a killer hook before they’re off, on another tempo change, tape loop or multi-tracked riff. If pranksters The Darkness want somewhere to go on a new album they would do well to take note of this – it seems at one and the same time a homage, pastiche and reinvention of the styles concerned.
Andy By The Lake meshes a folksy Led Zeppelin guitar with a Nick Drake vocal and Mark Hollis-style interesting piano touches to emerge in Jethro Tull country, that make it genuinely affecting, even if it does eulogise the weather: “thunder, lighting…rain.“
Cold Blooded Trees is relatively spare and unchanging, but has a vocal full of apt Bowie phrasing driven along by bass and tambourine, blossoming into a Hedwig and the Angry Itch-style declamation.
Winnipeg is a tight power-ballad painted with the colours of the first tracks, where the guitar sounds are particularly finely-wrought. Waterstriders is more ethereal Tull. So is the eight-minute Ship of Fire, which tells a gruesome narrative of a death at sea and its consequences, its verses defined with strident shades of Fleetwood Mac – “tiger sharks as slaves…“ The guitars are again spot-on, without being too flashy.
A charming hymn that develops out of multi-tracked vocal harmonies, Kathleen shows that even the end of the album has a capacity for invention and surprise.
It is possible to appreciate Martin Tielli on a number of levels. A one-man eclipse of Jack Black and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, he is well worth a listen for a laugh: crank it up and camp it up. But he can also give you a quite comprehensive sonic history of seventies rock, and taken head on, the tail end of the album has a drama and power that is undeniable. D.Rose
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