Description
Label Review.
2017 album.
Our Overview.
London four-piece Trailer Trash Tracys approach to making music as a fine balance between chaos and order, laying out a dense and dreamlike ecosystem of Sufi poetry, Solfeggio scales and, floating above it all, Susanne Aztoria’s otherworldly yet emotionally charged vocals. They strive to sound like they’re playing at least three different songs from a variety of genres at a time, in different tempos and keys, loosely connected by Susanne’s drifting, amorphous melody lines and unsettling cosmic tonal warps. But, by employing the My Bloody Valentine trick of never allowing themselves to lose focus on their hooks through the sonic soup, it makes for an engrossing listen.
With ‘Althaea’, Trailer Trash Tracys follow-up to 2012’s critically acclaimed debut album ‘Ester’, the band continue their investigations into the farther flung reaches of pop music, with stunning results.
Spanning 10 deeply esoteric tracks, ‘Althaea’ sees the band drift further afield from traditional song structures to create a new aural lexicon of their own, one as influenced by Filipino carnival music and Latin rhythms as it was by Japanese tropical music from the 80s. Even at their most outwardly pop - the pristine ‘Eden Machine’, for instance, or the swooning ‘Kalesa’ - there is a baroque splendour and heightened sensuality. The interplay of light and dark - the foreign and the familiar - brings forth an album with manifold pleasures, one which rewards repeated listening and further exploration.
The album is also a soundtrack to Filipino filmmakers Raya Martin and Charles Salazar’s forthcoming film with the same name. On their collaboration Raya says, “‘Althaea’ is a narrative about being stuck in a strange mystical island. It’s a landscape that’s at once familiar, aggressive, drifting, odd and unexpected. The music by Trailer Trash Tracys perfectly transports us to this place hidden in all of us.”