The Telephone Numbers 
Now, I’d have told you it was pretty much impossible to improve on The Telephone Numbers’ debut. The band’s 2021 album was a jangled gem that found the SF band rifling through ‘80s and ‘90s college rock record bins, tape club catalogs, and UK Flexi curios. It was a love letter soaked in the scents of the past, but the band manages to best themselves at their own game on Scarecrow II. They don’t ditch the jangled path for the follow-up, but rather burrow deeper into the aesthetics that endeared them to a league of listeners over the last few years. The band connects with Alicia Vanden Heuvel (The Aislers Set) at her Speakeasy Studios for the new record, surrounding themselves with friends from the SF indie pop scene, including Anna Hillburg, Andy Pastalaniec (Chime School, Seablite), and Tony Molina. The assembled players mold the new record into a swooning, saturated vision of pop that’s more than just a melancholy mediation on love lost, ambitions crushed, and struggles with expectations and ego.
Like their forever foils The Red, Pinks, and Purples, the record is shrouded in a shadow of late stage capitalism, the kind that can’t help but creep in around the side streets of tech-tumbled San Francisco. The sighs of “This Job Is Killing Me,” the laments of “Pulling Punchlines,” both feel the boot of the day job on their neck. Yet, at its heart, the record is more about the struggle with self than the fight against external forces. Throughout the album’s inner turmoil, the newly added embellishments pull Scarecrow II towards its place as one of the most sparkling of their West Coast contemporaries. Pastalaniec’s organ lines cradle Thomas Rubenstein’s stellar hooks. On several tracks, Hillburg and K. Dylan Erdich slip in a sense of grandeur with brass and strings, throwing odes towards The Go-Betweens, Sneetches, and, as the band doesn’t shy away from noting, early-era Gin Blossoms. The new record sets The Telephone Numbers up, not as ones to watch, but rather ones to catch. They’re no longer the upstarts of their early singles, but instead indie pop purists creating essentials for the long haul.
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