Over the course of their lush and defiantly unclassifiable sophomore album Althaea, London duo Trailer Trash Tracys condense a number of disparate styles into music that thrillingly broaches the void between figuration and abstraction. The result is the band’s most ambitious and idiosyncratic body of work to-date, one which operates at the very limits of what pop music can be. Spanning 10-tracks, Althaea sees Trailer Trash Tracys drift afield from traditional song structures and create a new aural lexicon of their own, one as influenced by Filipino carnival music and Latin rhythms as it is by Japanese tropical music from the 80’s. While songs like Smoked Silver chase an opulent haze of seesawing synths and stuttering beats, stubbornly refusing to resolve themselves, others, like Betty’s Cavatina , seem to have been built on structures so intricate and fragile they seem in perpetual danger of collapsing in on themselves at any given moment. Even at their most outwardly pop – the pristine Eden Machine for instance, or the swooning Kalesa , there is a baroque splendour, and heightened sensuality, stemming from Jimmy Lee’s resolutely off-kilter instrumentation and the fact that quite often Aztoria seems to be singing in an alien language entirely of her own creation. The interplay of light and dark, the foreign and the familiar, brings forth an album with manifold pleasures, one which rewards repeated listening and further exploration. And even though with Althaea, Trailer Trash Tracys seek to disorient and upend traditional strictures of pop, they have, in their own way, delivered a modern classic anyway. “When people hear the record we want them to be transported to a place that’s romantic, exotic, unfamiliar but real and welcoming”, they muse. “Someone also mentioned that our album could have been the soundtrack for a film like Wong Kar Wai’s “Days of Being Wild” or Ishamel Bernal. If people feel like this when listening to our music then that’s more than we have ever anticipated”.
A1 Smoked Silver
A2 Eden Machine
A3 Gong Gardens
A4 Siebenkäs
A5 Money For Moondogs
B1 Betty's Cavatina
B2 Casadora
B3 Singdrome
B4 Kalesa
B5 100 Aspects Of The Moon
