„Supremely weird indie-rock. The weirdness of which just isn’t quite conveyed in the download that we’re offering up to you, because you really need to hear all of Trupa Trupa’s album, ++, in sequence – flickering randomly and frequently as it does from dirge, to punk jam, to crescendo rock anthem – before you grasp quite how atypical it is.
The lyrics are not just goofily abstract in the accustomed lo-fi way, they’re violent and provocative. Upsetting. The music carves out an even deeper dissonance, as it unfurls with a rare tenderness and warmth, consoling, like a slow-motion cuddle! Ice-pick guitar undermined by deep, weary sighs of brass. Angular moments of noise snuggling up against intricately-plotted basslines and rhythms, sensing no apparent contradiction.
Bands like Future Of The Left and Melvins subvert their own instincts for aggression with gibberish. But neither band sound so…. lovely…?? While doing so, as this: Trupa Trupa – Here and Then.
There are moments in Trupa Trupa’s randomised rock that remind us of assorted lost just-leftfield-of-mainstream rock groups of the late 90s and early 00s who never even achieved cult status, but were still all flavours of special to us.
Here are some of them: Shooting At Unarmed Men – Pathos Ate Bathos, Cable – Ultra Violet, Party of One – Shotgun Funeral, Marmoset – Blooms.
But Trupa Trupa are really great musicians, and they play with the sincerity and chops of The Sea and Cake or an American Analog Set. If they prettied up their messy bits, stopped singing about wanting people to kill people, and wrote proper songs instead of stark minor-key mantras they’d be all over Pitchfork. And they’d suck! So don’t do that, Trupa Trupa. You’re too strange a proposition for other humans to like you.”
