|
Records: Trans Am's The Surveillance
Check out The Surveillance sound clips at
By Jeff Sprague Some music critics have a shameful tendency to indulge in literary creativity while ignoring a band's musical creativity. When Trans Am releases an album, these critics bombard the press with bland imitations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Their versions typically run like this: "As Jekyll, Trans Am performs painstaking experiments, mixing varying quantities of pounding march, off-kilter time signatures, and ZZ Top guitar work. At times, the concoction transforms the band into its sinister doppelgänger, Le Car, who destroys the lab with scattered rounds of Atari and Casio BB fire." Electronica neophytes worsen the predicament, posing as literary critics for the mangled text, and make Le Car a playful subversion of rock's dominant sonic vocabulary.Fortunately, the trio's latest offering, The Surveillance, resists any plans for another trip into the narrative wasteland. Although Trans Am segregates the rock and synth instrumentals, the latter no longer loom ominously in the background. Sharing the spotlight, the two explore more common aesthetic territory, dispensing with the classic rock noodlery and adding a low-range groove. The synth employs a more diverse arsenal of electronic cheese, shaping grander textures within continued rhythmic minimalism. I suggest a new literary map for test-driving the '98 model of the angular macho mobile: André Breton's surrealist masterpiece, Nadja. In the surrealist tradition, Trans Am makes the ordinary extraordinary. Denying melody and harmony, they rely only on raw textures to animate and frighten the minimal rhythmic grooves. The romantic vein of the narrative also conveys the union Trans Am builds between rock instruments and synthesizers. Breton carries the romance into paranoia, fearing that Nadja may be only an extension of himself, and perhaps this is what Trans Am had in mind with the album's title. Wow, so Trans Am and Le Car may in fact be one and the same? The guido drivers of the Jersey shore will have something to say about this.
|
||||||||||||||||
All materials © 1998 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
Got any questions, comments, or advice? Email the online editors at online@yaleherald.com.
Like to join us?