#tropicaltrash

Tropical Trash, Southern Indiana Drone Footage (National Waste Products, 2019)

So between Louisville, KY, where the Tropical Trash band lives, and Southern Indiana runs the Ohio river. I’ve never been to neither of these places, but I grew up on the South Bank of the biggest river in Italy. If I’d written a post-punk-psychedelic-noise-rock record of my own, I could’ve called it South-Eastern Lombardy Drone Footage (‘Filmati da Drone del Sud-Est Lombardo’) and it would’ve probably had a similar sentiment. To grow up by a border means not belonging to any place. It’s easy to feel like a mutant, and SIDF is definitely the product of mutants.

It just sounds like they’ve been playing together a lot, which is definitely true because they’ve been touring a lot and they’re constantly working on music either with TT or various side projects. So you can feel the comfort and the confidence in these songs. Some are “hits", straightforward rock songs that grab you by the collar and shake you until you burst out laughing; some are free-noise fragments sent hurling in space that could easily land this record in the “psycho-jazz” section at the record store; some are a little bit of both, catchy songs that experiment with structure and sound.

But the real magic is in the details. The recording: crisp and clean, but also alive with little sounds that reverberate in the background. The lyrics: a long string of non-sequiturs and absurd images that could irritate you or fascinate you, but are impossible to ignore. And the drums: behind the wall of guitars and clarinets and whathaveyou, the drummer Sal does such an amazing job on this record—he's never over-the-top and he's appropriately repetitive when he needs to, but he also takes chances and adds a lot to the mood.

It’s also worth noting that the album doesn’t have any of those toxic mean vibes that have driven a lot of people away from noisier shades of rock. It’s a feel-good record made by mutants, “a psychic fold in the wind”, a road map for car-dogs on their way home.

Click here to listen to Southern Indiana Drone Footage on Bandcamp.