Kategoria: recenzje

Trupa Trupa’s monochrome post-punk is committed yet functional.

Sam Richards, UNCUT

It’s been a joy covering Trupa Trupa over the past couple of years, and I was absolutely delighted to see the band from Gdańsk, Poland, popping up here on Whited Sepulchre’s split series. Their brand of psychedelic post-punk with intensely political undertones (frontdude Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a fascinating poet and researcher, digging into some World War II–related topics on CBC radio documentary “The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp”) is easy to return to again and again, and their new record “Of the Sun” on Lovitt is a stunner. Here we get “I’ll find,” a sixteen-minute castoff from that record that the band admitted they just couldn’t stop playing. So it sees the light of day here on the A-side, a rumbling kraut jam with ethereal vocals and mesmerizing repetition that expands and contracts the longer it goes, like lungs taking in and expelling breath. It’s paired with “Voice of Rain” by Austin psych-rockers Suspirians, and it’s an inspired match. While Suspirians don’t have as even a keel – or an even keel at all – the trio kick out almost seventeen minutes of dense jammage, just as Texans are bound to do if you give them guitars and drums and such and plug them in. Plus, Suspirians are witches, I think! Which makes their side even cooler. I’m riding that pagan vibe all the way to my own oblivion, riding that nuke till it blows up somewhere way out in the desert.

Ryan Masteller, www.tabsout.com

In this week of love and sickness, of course, some new music needs to emphasize the ‘sickness’-part of that equation. Cindy Lee and Trupa Trupa both released stuff that’s simultaneously beautiful and bloodcurdling. The latter took this quite literally by showing footage of a friggin snowman on fire in their video for ‘End Of The Line’. The song reminds me a bit of Deerhunter’s ‘Sailing’, and that’s a good thing.

Jasper Willems, www.medium.com

Da wächst langsam etwas Großes zusammen, diese Feststellung hatte ich zu „Headache“ geschrieben. Das war 2015, und es handelte sich dabei um das dritte Album der Band Trupa Trupa. Zwei Jahre später erschien „Jolly New Songs“, und das war schon ein toller kompakter Brocken, aber auch ein wenig undurchsichtig, dabei sehr reizvoll und auch schon großartig.

I’ve seen Trupa Trupa twice this year, once a month! And both times their incredible songs have taken on a slightly different life. Friday at MENT Ljubljana they again proved why they are one of the best rock bands right now. No song ever goes exactly where you’d expect – they have sweetness, aggression, light and dark in the sound woven from alt-rock, math-rock, shoegaze and classic pop.

Polish band Trupa Trupa is a far more complicated picture to draw, as they take to the stage in Ljubliana Castle. Having seen them as a three-piece in January, their usual fourth member added even more complexity to this enigma of a band. A singular type of rock band, that exist in our understanding but also just outside of it, their pained vocals dance with a vibrant rhythmic backdrop, crushing walls of noise and psychedelic pop melodies. When their violence dissipates for calm, they hit heights of engulfing beauty. Every audience I have been in watching Trupa Trupa has left stunned, gasping for more but not fully understanding why – that is a special kind of band.

James Thornhill, www.undertheradarmag.com