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Tekro Music / Rough Trade [Release date: 18.03.22]
Fast approaching 60, Oslo born guitarist, Ronni Le Tekro, ex TNT, is not for slowing down. He’s guested on some interesting albums of late, but Bigfoot TV is his first solo outing for 6 years.
It’s an album of constantly shifting currents and moods, simply refusing to be pinned down or pigeonholed.
And it’s all the better for it.
For TNT fans who lost interest when the band broke up, there’s a huge distance between then and now. Correction, the band didn’t really break up, it just stopped making albums (only one release since 2010). Which isn’t quite the same thing.
He played guitar on the two undervalued, hard rocking Vagabond albums in the 90s, and three jazz oriented, two-guitars albums, with fellow Norwegian, Terje Rypdal (who had two compositions featured in the Pacino/DeNiro Hollwood movie, “Heat”) in the late 90s and early 2000s.
The tongue in cheek titles of his most recent solo albums, Mein Ampf (2014) and Mein Ampf 2 (2015) suggested we were in for some fun. Instead what we got was a breathtaking mishmash of psychedelia, New Wave, Pop and Blues with industrial metal leanings.
Le Tekro has carried that mindset (minus the metal) into Bigfoot TV.
And it’s most notably encountered on three key songs.
The fond look back at ‘Life On Long Island’, a musical mixture of Thin Lizzy’s rock panache and Ian Dury’s storytelling bravura.
Again on ‘Handful of Time’s jump cut from Uillean pipes and Celtic rhythms to Magical Mystery Tour’s full fat psychedelic pop choruses.
And perhaps most invitingly on ‘Eyes Of The Woods’.
This closing song’s subtle Floydian textures and atmospheric, Traffic like touches are perfectly tailored for ecological protest, sixties style, providing a gloriously majestic finish to the album.
Elsewhere, ‘UFO’s Bowie/Roxy Music’s arthouse clash of ideas , and ‘Demons’ switch from mellow acoustic guitar, to a locked down bluesy groove, are just as teasing and inviting.
It’s clearly an album you’ve got to treat with TLC… and patience… but eventually it loves you back. ****
Review by Brian McGowan
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