A STRANGE HAPPENING – TRIA PULSAT Tria Pulsat invites us into a kind of alternative dimension for storytelling with the sounds of an ancient and BY TOM MURPHY distorted radio broadcast. The album feels like it’s arranged to be a soundtrack to a lost Don Coscarelli film. This is incandescent alt-country-flavored rock given a human resonance by Jacob Adamson’s soulful quaver. On the spooky and moody “Ever Crone,” Elisha Coy elevates the blues groove with her warm yet spectral warble. The album’s title perhaps means “Three Knocks,” and each song is like a room in a haunted local hangout, separated by a fragment of late-night radio salvaged from broadcasts sent into space 70 years ago. Refreshingly unique. BUTTHOLE SURFERS – AFTER THE ASTRONAUT Intended as the follow up to the 1996 hit record Electriclarryland and recorded in 1998, this album was immediately deemed not suitable for release by Capitol Records. A different version of many of these songs was put out as Weird Revolution in 2001. Fortunately, the glorious strangeness of the tracks was preserved. These original recordings reveal the band delving deeper into electronic music aesthetics, beat-driven composition and experiments in soundmaking. Armed with a new set of tools, they lean fully into the influential and deeply creative, bizarre lane the Butthole Surfers embodied and pioneered. Think a psychedelic acid house, big beat dub punk record with a devilishly subversive edge. COP KILLER – S/T This EP begins with a sample but immediately accelerates to an unhinged aggression and caustic spirit toward abusive authority. “Police State” roasts the surveillance and security state. “Copaganda” demolishes the collusion of media and culture with capital in lionizing the police, in spite of obvious and ample evidence of egregious abuse in service of the latter. “Antisocial Network” comes off like Big Black in its vitriolic blasts of fuzz, further amplifying disdain for mass media as a tool of state repression. “Three Letter Organizations” is reminiscent of prime MDC in sonically and verbally taking down the FCC, NSA, DEA and CIA. The cover of Body Count’s Cop Killer updates the tune for modern times. An instant classic. GOLD GLUE – THE DREAM CHANGES The opening track “Not A Yo La Tengo Cover” sets the mood for this album. Although it doesn’t sound like a YLT song, it has dynamic depths that one expects from the indie rock legends. Besides, it’s more like Wilco trying to write like Mission of Burma. That aside, throughout this set of songs there is a palpable sense of seeking meaning through everyday experiences rather than chasing it in the sorts of things you’re told to find it. The tracks have some raw edges, but it suits the mood perfectly. With humor informed by having been through the wringer and dark places of the heart multiple times, this album is heavy and harrowing, yet hopeful and uplifting. JESUS CHRIST TAXI DRIVER – TAXI THE RICH For its sophomore record, Jesus Christ Taxi Driver pushes further into its signature blend of blues rock and proto punk with a touch of psychedelia. More stylistically refined and focused than 2023’s Lick My Soul, it also reveals the band has shed any of the affectations of previous projects and captures more fully the nearly unhinged energy of the live show. The album indulges in conceptual flourishes that dig at American culture, especially pointedly at the Epstein class with the borderline yacht rock “Too Cold To Golf.” But the whole record is a send-up of the now completely discredited fiction of American exceptionalism, including the farce of the American Dream. TINY HUMANS – S/T If the better grunge bands were essentially punk updated for a new era of austerity politics eroding and crushing the dreams and hopes of a new generation, this self-titled debut EP is in that tradition. Rich with cathartic riffs fusing melody and distortion, there is something undeniably catchy about these songs. It’s not pop punk, but the music feels anthemic. And if an immediate comparison might be made with grunge, it isn’t sludgy, slow or dark. Instead, it’s more irreverent in its heated vocal moments and sharing the sense of alienation and cynicism for mainstream culture and its compromised hypocrisies that gave alternative rock its edge. SEE MORE: QUEENCITYSOUNDS.ORG No. 150
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