Trupa Trupa

B FLAT A review – The Quietus

Imagine the Beatles and Velvet Underground reading Hannah Arendt while in the studio with film director Michael Haneke. That’s Trupa Trupa in a nutshell, a Gdańsk-based band who spent the last decade perfecting their balancing act between lyrical songs and crushing psychedelia.

‘Moving’ and ‘Twitch’ have an intense and aggressive Fugazi style, ‘Uniforms’ and ‘All In All’ are reminiscent of Beatles melodies and ‘Lines’ is a psychedelic acid trip in the vein of Syd Barrett. It’s worth listening to Grzegorz Kwiatkowski and Wojciech Juchniewicz’s lyrics, in which they confront everyday evils. On B FLAT A they sing repetitive sentences, introverted confessions or loud slogans – sometimes one word can radically distort the original thought. It’s worth being alert: in ‘Uniforms’ we don’t even notice when the line ‘I want to eat all my uniforms’ transforms into ‘I want to be all my uniforms’. It reminds me of the children’s games from Haneke’s The White Ribbon: you can feel the horror if you know history.

Jakub Knera, www.thequietus.com

B FLAT A review – The Quietus