We’ve all heard first impressions are everything. Cliché sayings are never a good way to kick things off unless you want to think outside the box, circle up, and put together a brainstorming session, but hear me out.   

As a fuzzed solo enters your ears, followed by a Russ Ballard guitar lick, before being spun into a frenzy of horns and Latin-inspired beats, the first impressions of San Diego area-based Elektric Voodoo’s latest release, Telescope, take all of six seconds to sever your connection with any hesitancy and go all in.

Telescope steps out with an unyielding tenacity. World rock guides Elektric Voodoo lay it all on the line, from the first note of “Chasing Ghosts,” through the incredible soundscape of “Cross That Line,” to the culminating end of “Children Are The Revolution.” The new and old techniques simultaneously thrive within the cross-border blends smoothly concocted within the framework of Elektric Voodoo’s latest release.

The blending of worldly influence integrated into a recipe of new-meets-old feel brings about a sense of eclectic and intimate. It’s eclectic Elektric Voodoo, that they do.  Repeatedly, track after track, Elektric Voodoo’s third album hand-crafts vivid landscapes, punctuated by a profound sense of awareness for the craft, only to tear them down at each outro and make way for the next. Beginning to end, each of the nine songs is a journey through the minds of these immensely talented musicians, one where the road is as smooth as silk and the transitions seemingly unidentifiable, except when they want you to know. All songs are four-plus minutes each; only two coming in under five. Impressively, you wouldn’t notice unless you looked.

To portray the sound Elektric Voodoo set out to achieve, injecting time-spanning club sounds, horns, driving synth, searing breakdowns that will melt the night, all layers considered is a massive undertaking. However, to not only hit that bar, but to glide confidently past expectation is nothing short of brilliant precision and an honest feeling for the art. Telescope is not a record, it is a musical experience akin to reaching up and grabbing a shooting star out of the night sky.

A mix of culture and imagination, spun into a celebration as anchored in difference as it is rhythms, in the form of prism-bending Afrobeat, jazz-fused, semi-psych rock Matt Bozzone, Luke Henning, Ty Kiernan, Bradley Nash, Travis Klein, and Scott Tournet, with the aid of Mitchum Yacoub, Jenaine Benitex, Sharifa Muhammad, and Ari Abedon, walked into the studio with an idea and exited with, definitively, one of the most memorable albums of 2021. The swell of cool that firmly establishes the presence of Elektric Voodo is infectious and soaring. Telescope makes no qualms about lifting you up from the first impression. What happens thereafter, well, it has to be heard to understand. Telescope is out August 20, 2021.