TVD's Musique Non Pop | Teepee 'Morals'

Our friend Brandon, one half of the dynamic DJ duo behind We Fought The Big One returns with our first Musique Non Pop of the new decade. —Ed.


Teepee - Morals (Sensei, 2009 LP only)

So much of modern criticism is skewed toward the comparative. It’s a lazy and sometimes thuggish situation geared more towards the display of the critic’s own hierophant-like knowledge of the modern record. But, besides being somewhat petty, this approach fails on at least two major levels.

First, the writerly one—which is that the product is unreadable (the English major in me gets more upset by this than most, probably.) But the other, more important failure is that it fails completely to capture the process, the craft and the spirit of the work it was intent on translating into the written word.

Thus the comparative review can only ever truly minimize by association that what it might want to lionize and really fucking miss the boat on what it’s like to struggle with something just to get it right. This, the best of the bands do, laboring long hours on a record, only to get Velvet Underground dropped in their laps by someone still living at Hotel Mom.


I have to admit to having come up short when trying to review the new album by Teepee, the alias of Miami’s own, Eric Lopez-Delgado. I haven’t been able to do it justice in any way. I toyed with a scissor kick off a Marshall stack while fist-pumping “it’s fucking awesome” approach—including rampaging through the thesaurus, picking out every juicy synonym for moody, rocking, opaque, blastular etc. I even thought of being the lazy shit and name-dropping a certain mid-eighties art-rock band from Illinois, but killed that immediately (See paragraph 1.)

I settled ultimately on the narrative. In this case, in the depth of the night, there came the realization. How can one write about sensibility? How can you properly capture, in words the thing that allows an artist to simply know how long the cues between songs should be and just what order those songs should be in? And how those songs should be so haunting way beyond the coolness you feel about owning a labor of love record by someone obviously without an ounce of rock star cynicism?

I should shut up now and let you listen to the song. But allow me to end this review in an ellipsis and question mark…..?

Teepee - I Told You So (Mp3)