Saturday, July 28, 2012

Blue Horns by Trestles



I have been a fan of the LA duo that is "Trestles" since I "met" them on reverbnation, when reverbnation was cool. I was pleasantly surprised to see them on bandcamp under the "Chimera Central" collective.

Eighties style synthesizers, heavy percussion, and samples are the bread and butter of Trestles. The eighties influence is pretty evident, and it's a good thing. Of course, the album would not be reviewed here if it didn't have strong melodies as well.

My fave tracks on the album are: "Trussell Royal-Tea", "Bobbit Drive" (the percussion is epic and the crowd seems to agree with me), "Time Is Digitized", and "Yeti". "Yeti" is a very long track (11:45), it's really two tracks separated by an interlude of soothing crashing waves. The second part is what seems like a collage of samples from a boat racing movie accompanied by a pretty cool melodic line.

I really like this album as a whole. I have a few (minor) criticisms though.

"Ladyhawk" samples Falco's "Der Kommissar". To this day, I am not completely sure it works because that 80s anthem has been so over played and heard that it becomes annoying. "Eggrolls" is not a bad track per se but it kinda seems out of place in the album, with its heavy jungle/urban feel. Not saying that having widely different tracks in an album is a bad thing. Check for example "$" which is a slight departure from the rest of the album with its heavy use of spoken word samples and slower tempo ("Yeti" also).

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