Headache Review – Whisperin and hollerin
It’s appropriately titled, just as was the Big Black EP of the same title. Only where Polish four-piece Trupa Trupa are concerned, it’s more of a slowly nagging throb than one of those splintering, cranium-splitting bastard headaches.
It begins with the chaotic discord of the unproduced and dissonant-sounding lurch-rock of ‘Snow’, track that simply sounds wrong and painful, although some chiming guitars briefly hint at melody amidst the droning atonal noise. It swiftly moves on to a hazy psychedelic smog that’s infused with a shade of narcotics-induced doom and foreboding and then again transitions to roaring indie-rock with a psychedelic edge that evokes early Pink Floyd and a chorus that owes more to 90s grunge. So far, so hard to get a handle on.
The corruscating, bass-shredding noise of ‘Getting Older’, which splays itself over six and a half minutes helps no a jot, but it’s a true behemoth. ‘Wasteland’ sounds like post-rock Pavement, while ‘Rise and Fall’ calls to mind a super-tripped out Beatles armed with a rack of distortion pedals. It doesn’t so much induce a headache as fuck with your head.
The nagging nine-minute title track is a psychedelic epic in every sense, and explodes into a cataclysmic crescendo that sustains for what feels like an eternity, a raging inferno of sound.
Cracking stuff.