REVIEW - Dan Moore

"The Tea Club's musicianship is the group's bread-and-butter; their focused and disciplined use of dynamics sets them apart from bands that adhere strictly to the LOUD-quiet-LOUD model. They are reminiscent of bands like Explosions In the Sky, Radiohead and TV On the Radio in that they are capable of lulling an audience quietly into a trance just before sending them into a whiplash-inducing tail-spin of feedback, grungy duet vocals and pummeling percussion.

Most "modern rock" groups place a premium on immediacy, on delivering the goods right away. They push forward to a predictable catharsis with the urgency of a bullet-train and are then left with nothing to do but bask in an overly-long, manufactured moment that feels cheap, unearned and, frankly, easy. The Tea Club forgo this obvious, "a-ha!" style of songwriting in favor of a measured, simmering approach that delivers cathartic moments that are "deserved," that don't feel like the result of a conscious attempt on the part of the musicians to spring an ambush on their audience.

Many prog-rock acts fall flat in a live setting. The Mars Volta have been known to play an hour-long set consisting of only three songs, one of which being a nearly forty-minute jam so wrought with electronics, pedals and switches that an audience member might be forgiven for assuming that he or she was listening to a serious of intercepted alien radio communications or, perhaps, a pair of cyborg-whales in the midst of a heated argument. ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead have been known to take nearly forty-five minutes just to set up their equipment. These are both bands that I love but let's face it: prog doesn't always translate well to the stage. The Tea Club are a lucky and intense exception to that rule; they play blistering guitar parts note-for-note, they break strings and keep playing, they roll on the floor and beat the shit out of their instruments and knock things over and improvise when they feel like it but only enough to get the point across. "Energetic" and "prog" are often thought of as mutually exclusive adjectives (take a look at the sometimes stiff, always completely goofy performances by Jethro Tull on youtube for the perfect example) but the Tea Club overcome both the stereotype of the buttoned-up, classically-minded prog band and the loose, sloppy live-band.

The Tea Club will lower taxes, increase benefits for the needy, socialize health-care and not embarrass themselves while bowling.

The Tea Club will strike a chord (and, more often than not, turn it into an arpeggio) with music listeners who want music that will challenge them to think while they listen, and not just about the lyrics. The South Jersey quartet is doing complex stuff onstage and doesn't seem to mind following a muse just to see where it leads them. The Tea Club are "experimental rock" in the sense that they are willing to toy with rock music on the formal level and not merely on the purely aesthetic, "spot-that-influence" level."