The music of ‘90s post-rock survivors Trans Am has been known to follow a pendulum-like qualitative swing. Their new record captures them closer to the positive side of that spectrum, though it’s also not without certain problems. As Volume X represents a landmark for the band in terms of longevity, the LP’s breadth of style and range of value is rather fitting.
Trans Am, a unit comprised for the entirety of their quarter century existence of guitarist Phil Manley, bassist/ occasional vocalist Nathan Means, and drummer Sebastian Thomson, are defined to varying degrees by their restlessness of genre. Countless bands somehow manage to survive beyond a few albums to soon enough champ at the bit of stylistic constraint, but Trans Am has displayed a resistance to getting fenced-in formally from near the start of their lifespan.
To elaborate, while Krautrock, electro-funk, and heavy metal, to cite three Trans Am touchstones, are to this day rarely spoken of in the same context, before the group’s Bethesda, MD emergence and gradual placement as a member of the ‘90s post-rock brigade, any conversational relationship between those disparate forms occurred even less frequently.
And speaking of post-rock, some continue to evaluate the outfits residing under that admittedly broad descriptive banner, e.g. Tortoise, Mogwai, Stereolab, The Sea and Cake, Don Caballero, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as being too stylistically diverse for the nomenclature to actually mean much of anything.
For others however, the term serves as tidy shorthand for a generation of groups that utilized genre precedent, namely Fusion jazz to Afrobeat to soundtracks (Morricone is referenced often in numerous post-rock settings) to yes indeed, Krautrock, electronic music (everything from 20th century classical to dance pop to assorted strains of techno to the aforementioned electro-funk) and even hard rock (as is the case with Trans Am collaborators The Fucking Champs), these bands absorbing and extending the styles without falling easily into any one specific, previously ensconced bag.
Instead, they signified a new if wide-ranging and loosely affiliated development. In this sense Post-Rock as a terminology is analogous to the use of Post-Modernism across a variety of artistic disciplines. To focus on (and obviously oversimplify) only literature, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover and John Hawkes and Stanley Elkin and William Gaddis and John Barth were all highly unique writers branded with the tag post-modernist.
Of course, there did exist related factors that got those heavyweight word-slingers lumped beneath the umbrella of Po-Mo, just as the wild diversity of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein and Joyce and Faulkner and Pound also possessed a consistent similarity which landed the lot of them into the category of Modernist, or in this case simply Mo.
So it was with post-rock, though in truth many of the form’s practitioners (as noted above) drew upon influences from far outside of the standard rock sphere. But it’s also true that once established, the way most post-rockers grew their sound wasn’t terribly unlike how the majority of rock bands and pop acts operated (and continue to do so); in a nutshell, this is where much post-rock differs from the discography of Trans Am.
As the title of their new LP elucidates, Trans Am’s persistence has resulted in ten studio offerings. Two of those efforts endure as masterpieces (‘99’s Futureworld, the following year’s Red Line), a few come close (‘98’s The Surveillance, ‘07’s welcome return to something like prior form Sex Change), a couple are solid but flawed (‘97’s Surrender to the Night, ‘10’s Thing) and one is widely dismissed and occasionally flat-out disdained (‘02’s TA).
Every Tortoise fan (for example) has a least favorite album by the group, but they also foster a healthy listenership and one would suspect a fair amount of completist fans. The situation seems quite different with Trans Am; folks have championed them as groundbreakers and disparaged them as a novelty act, with those judgments often coming from the very same person.
Volume X makes clear that the band remains unbothered with the divisiveness of opinion. A trim LP, it lacks the sly cohesiveness that defines their best work, but as the ten songs unwind it also avoids (with one major exception) sinking into the quicksand of irony. After a rising synthesizer prelude, “Anthropocene” opens the disc with a brawny fuzzed-out riff and galloping drums to match, though the employment of non-processed vocals lends the track a feel that’s more orthodox than Trans Am’s top material.
The vocoder-soaked electro-funk centerpiece of “Reevaluations,” while in no way mind-blowing (to anybody that has heard Chromeo or !!!, anyway), does land nearer to expectations, with thick burbling Moroder-esque keyboards, maximal drum fills, brittle yet energetic intermittent guitar strum, and chilly robotic vocals momentarily diverting into falsetto funkiness. Plus, there’s a borderline ludicrous talk-box solo.
Those customers preferring the Trans Am that lives just a little bit closer to an art-rock neighborhood might wince, but with the soaring and insistent kosmische reverberations of “Night Shift,” they should be satisfactorily (though temporarily) appeased. Almost reminiscent at times of a meeting of mid-‘70s Kraftwerk and Columbia-era Terry Riley, “Night Shift” ends far too quickly, though it does offer a curious fade.
Unfortunately, at 1:28 the angular android funk of “K Street” is essentially a fragment, more segue than fully fleshed-out song. As additional opening synth ambiance dissipates, “Backlash” reveals torrid speed metal with appropriately intricate guitar soloing and techno-distorted bottom end. From there the space rock/ prog intersection of “Ice Fortress” helps to bring Volume X needed balance. Eventually landing in a Krautrock place, its copious reverberating synths impact the ear like Tangerine Dream doing soundtrack work for the cut-rate ‘80s action films.
Things progress in a fairly straightforward trajectory with the oddball techno-prog-metal of “Failure,” though its relative brevity underscores one of this record’s weakening aspects, specifically that some of the best tracks end just as they’re getting really interesting. And no doubt many will be wishing the audacious slow jam radio-pop balladry of “I’ll Never” featured an immediate fadeout.
A bit like the sound of weeknight karaoke in a nearly deserted bar after slugging down a bottle of prescription cough syrup, “I’ll Never” is guaranteed through ambiguous intent (Are They Serious?) to be the most divisive entry here. I do consider it to be Volume X’s least productive moment, though the oddity of its musical construction (particularly the unrelenting doomy lethargy of the drum-box beat, like something off a ‘80s Coil album) insures that it’s not a complete washout.
“Megastorm” connects as a further dose of straight-to-VHS soundtrack rocking (as it plays, it’s easy to imagine a bunch of shady guys loading contraband weapons onto the back of a flatbed truck), which leaves the acoustic strum-meets-woozy synth/keyboard textures of “Insufficiently Breathless” to close out the LP with a pleasant blend of the folky, the spacey, the New Agey, and the poppy.
Compared to Sex Change (their last consistently strong showing), Volume X registers as somewhat disappointing. It’s ultimately a record of peaks and valleys, familiar territory for Trans Am, and if much of the strongest stuff here is cut frustratingly short (with nothing attaining the heights of Sex Change’s “4,738 Regrets”), the low points are few in number and not without interest.
As their members become increasingly involved with other projects (Manley as engineer and as half of Life Coach with Queens of the Stone Age’s Jon Theodore, Thomson as drummer for Baroness), the frequency of Trans Am’s releases has slowed. Four years elapsed between this one and Thing, and Volume X follows a well-worn path for veteran bands; it’s not necessarily the album one wants as a listener, but what one gets is deeply informed by the group’s personality.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
