by Emma Ingrisani
As Tee Vee Repairmann, Sydney, Australia’s Ishka Edmeades is making grimy, giddy punk rock for the recoverably crestfallen. Following 2021’s excellent Patterns EP, debut full-length What’s On TV? is animated by anxiety, banal bad times, and waiting—for something in particular or anything at all.
Beyond the photocopy-of-a-photocopy album artwork and jokey, obsolescence-evoking band name, there’s an essential (and winning) shambolic earnestness to these songs. Terse, plainspoken delivery becomes a formal constraint to trap big emotions. “I don’t wanna let go,” Edmeades bleats through the reverb on album opener “Out Of Order,” and it feels equal parts heartfelt and abrasive. As on “Time 2 Kill,” “Backwards,” and “People (Everywhere I Go),” lyrical bluntness is belied by the music's effervescent melodies, verse-chorus careens, and the occasional spiky guitar solo.
This formula is especially potent on “Bus Stop” and “Checkout Queue,” each a bouncy ode to stymied desire and urban slogging. Powered by joyful bursts of guitar and theremin swirls, “Bus Stop” is gently funny, relentlessly catchy, and a breakup anthem cheekily employing public-transit-as-metaphor. “Time’s up! Whatcha gonna say?” Edmeades shouts, as if from the actual curb. “At the bus stop / I keep waiting for you!”
“Checkout Queue,” with its massive riffs and bleak scene of consumption and rejection—“I wait in line in the checkout queue / But you don’t even know my name”—finds an analogue in Buzzcocks at their most fizzy and brutal. Although What’s On TV? would play harmoniously alongside Singles Going Steady, the songwriting of TVR is less charged, messier, and more open-ended, both in sound and in gesture. Instead of Pete Shelley’s agonized thousand-yard stare, Edmeades throws out a kind of wild shrug—beleaguered, but holding out on hope.
As effective as What’s On TV? is at working with seventies-punk hallmarks, the moments when Edmeades rambles into something undefined can feel even more exciting. This happens powerfully on the despairing, sodden “Drownin’,” its emotional might building with each pounding drumbeat and twining guitar refrain. It’s also there on the oddball instrumental outro “Stuck In The Mould”: a meditative stroll into the distance, guitar chirping offhandedly over bagpipe-esque droning.
With a long list of other musical outfits in the Sydney scene (Gee Tee, Mainframe, Research Reactor Corp, Satanic Togas, Set-Top Box, etc), Edmeades is known for being prolific. As if to prove it, TVR released another EP during the writing of this review. 2 Big 4 My Boots lifts some fragments from the full-length: “Organic Mould” slaps the central riff of “Time 2 Kill” over a chunky electronic beat; “Drownin’” gets sort of chopped and screwed.
Listening to these still-newer tracks, the Repairmann moniker seems less like a joke and more like a canny statement of purpose for Edmeades, so clearly relishing experimentation amid old forms. “With the tools in my hand, I solve the problem,” TVR’s Bandcamp page declares. “What was broken, is no longer broken.” Here’s looking forward to more tinkering.