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
