Send "Morning Teleportation " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 “Boom Puma”, the opening track on Morning Teleportation’s debut album, starts with a few seconds of incoherent shouting, followed by a pounding drumbeat and a sloppy surf guitar riff. Singer Tiger Merritt comes in mumble-shouting some more nonsense, and then the song stops dead for some wordless vocal harmonies. Then it’s right back into the sloppy surf rock, this time with what sounds like talk-boxed guitar and background piano pounding. Halfway through its five-and-a-half minute running time, the song completely changes. The second half of the track shifts back and forth from a spacey, prog-rock guitar solo to an airy jam band-style falsetto vocal section.If this sounds head-spinningly weird and potentially awful, you’re not far wrong. “Boom Puma” is an exceedingly strange song that encapsulates a lot of what Morning Teleportation does, but it doesn’t come close to capturing them at their best. Second track “Eyes the Same” is much more traditional indie-rock, with actual lyrics, a catchy chorus, and strong interplay between the band’s two guitars and keyboards. It has a springy lightness to it, and actually doesn’t sound that different from something Modest Mouse would write. Which may be why Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock is fully on board promoting this band, co-producing the album and putting it out on his own Glacial Pace label. It isn’t until Expanding Anyway‘s third track, “Snow Frog vs. Motor Cobra” that Morning Teleportation start to reveal how good they can be. The song starts with a horn-laden groove that sounds like it came out of a ‘60s action show, complete with fiery guitar solo. Then it slides into a totally different groove dominated by a disco beat, cabaret-style piano, and a whacked-out tremolo synth line. There’s a third section to the song as well, with more talkbox guitar, this time singing the title of the track, and eventually the song ends up back in the disco beat cabaret. This time around, the head-on collision of styles actually works in the band’s favor, and it sounds like a coherent song....full text |
| Mvremix |
| Morning Teleportation, a five piece from Portland, OR, has a handful of different instruments in play on their debut album, Expanding Anyway, the Theremin being one of them. The Theremin is an electronic instrument; the controls are two metal antennas and it’s a no-hands kind of thing that controls oscillators for frequency and volume. The signals are amped up and sent through a loudspeaker. Essentially, it’s an instrument that can be played without being touched, and that basically is the bottom line of Expanding Anyway: Morning Teleportation play without exactly touching you. Morning Teleportation is, for some reason, being marketed as a psychedelic band but it lacks the dark sounds of true sketch-edge and the hallucinatory weirdness of legit trip music, so to call them psychedelic is a little nonsensical. Their debut album, Expanding Anyway, is produced by Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock and the latter band’s bright guitar melodies and twanging waves of grimy farm guitar have made their way into the intricate, hyper-active layers of Morning Teleportation’s entire album. Expanding Anyway is also the title track on the album; it’s psychedelic in the way a teenager tripping on a few grams of mushrooms is psychedelic; merry, unchallenging, and pop-fun. I’d be excited to listen to this band again in a few years, once they’ve moved into their proverbial early 20’s and start experimenting with DMT or something. The official music video for ‘Expanding Anyway,’ has all of the typical staples found in a psychedelic-lite product in 2011: Painted naked kids running through a field, neon mushrooms, trippy spirals and cute, bizarre animations. Basically being marketed as a psychedelic band in 2011 seems to have nothing to do with actually having some sort of face melting experience caused by tripping out to music that rearranges your brain matter. The video seems to stand as some sort of microcosmic example of the band’s style: A bit safe, familiar, but generally enjoyable. It’s tame, friendly fodder for the day trippers who dig the unchallengeable middle ground of a mild experience....full text |
| Spin |
| Yelping and shouting like a genuine mental case, frontman Tiger Merritt rides a joyously chaotic wave on this Portland, Oregon-based quintet's dizzying debut. Though coproduced by Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock and signed to his label, Morning Teleportation possess their own wacky identity, lurching from avant-garde mischief to pop operatics to folky sweetness. Their energy can be so overpowering that it takes a minute to notice the adeptness of the musicianship -- Merritt's exciting prog guitar riffs make the nine-minute "Wholehearted Drifting Sense of Inertia" feel too short....full text |
Morning Teleportation lyrics
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