The Tea Party are a band that throughout their career, have continually managed to reinvent their sound, while retaining the core components of blending a rock mentality with world music.
Transmission sits squarely in the middle of their career, and is probably the most different album they’ve ever done. Much darker in sound and theme than anything they’ve done before or since, Transmission is their classic eastern rock sound, as filtered through the gothic industrial style of Nine Inch Nails.
While in the 5 years following the release of NIN’s “The Downward Spiral” there were almost countless copycats with bands like Filter, Stabbing Westward, and Gravity Kills, The Tea Party’s offering to the genre stands out from the rest due to its impeccable vocals, and middle eastern influences, as evident on the intro to the opening track “Temptation”.
While the album starts off fairly straight-forward with “Temptation”, which is as made-for-radio as industrial gets, the highlights of this album for me are the incredible slow-build of “Psychopomp”, which really shows off Jeff Martin’s amazingly powerful and soulful voice; the eastern rock vibe of “Gyroscope”, and the experimental beats of “Transmission”. The piano interlude at the end of “Babylon” also deserves a mention.
Shortly after this album they released a DVD with many of the songs being performed on a music tv program, and while this would have been perfect video footage of a great band at their peak, the sound mix is unfortunately quite terrible, and much of the guitar punch is lost in the mix.
I recommend this to anyone who doesn’t mind embracing their dark side on occasion :)
Twelve Foot Ninja are everything I love about music. Equal parts heavy, catchy, melodic, and a little bit weird.
