The earliest recordings from Louisville, Kentucky’s Tropical Trash paint a portrait of a band in the throes of a gnarly identity crisis: punchy quickies that straddle hardcore and brownout punk; prickly, atonal half-hour jams that imply psychological warfare; plus the sort of outre, unclassifiable anti-music one might expect Byron Coley to extol in his Wire magazine “Bull Tongue” column. They were, it seemed, covering the spread, and on debut LP UFO Rot, the band flaunts and doubles down on this indecisiveness until it begins to resemble a hard-fought virtue.
“New Flesh” leads the album off in slash-and-burn fashion, a squealing fit of gnarled guitar distortion and primal drum pound that cuts out almost as soon as it’s begun. Astringent, one-chord…
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…thrash dominates the title track until—after a pregnant, feedback drenched pause—the song crashes through to a vista that’s more intensely chromatic and muscular. Enough gaps stud the blurred hardcore of “Heehaw Collider” that Tropical Trash have got to be baiting the slam-dancers in their audience. “Leisure Exposure” broadens the canvas to a more Fugazi-an notion of punk that contains heaving multitudes: snaggle-toothed slacker-rock solos, scales flambeed though furious ascents and descents, cymbal-strike drizzles, massed, pogoing ignition-rev dashes.
Things get hairier on the wild, freewheeling back half. Nine-minute “Knowing” glides from steamrolling prog-metal sludge to pulse-lowering snarl and back, while “Pink Sweat” genuflects at the glowering low-end of Shellac, eventually shoving white-hot dynamism so deep into the red that the song all but disintegrates. The overall effect, for the uninitiated, amounts to sort of a bait-and-switch, like early, aggro Black Flag giving way mid-set to late, furiously self-indulgent Black Flag.
Lyrically, UFO Rot mines themes of discomfort that complement the music’s restlessness, with the sneered non-sequiturs of co-vocalists Jim Marlowe and Ryan Davis calibrated to alienate and reject. “Any thought, if peeled, will pull apart,” the duo deadpan on the title track. “Heehaw Collider” is home to a tortured refrain of “I can’t complain,” while the lyric “it’s my intention to refuse you” turns up on two different songs. What fuels Tropical Trash, ultimately, is a raw, generous anxiety—borne of youth, borne of aimlessness, borne of limitlessness—so communicable that it’s nearly anthemic. If that seems slight, it’s certainly worth remembering that cults have been built on much less.