SXSW / Sound Opinions
Rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis discuss Trupa Trupa gig at SXSW on Sound Opinions, calling TT a “buried treasure” of the whole SXSW Festival!
“You’ve got some very dark humor here, if you can call it humor at all, sometimes the line is blurred between what is humorous and what is really dire.”
Listen to the whole podcast from 13 minute on Sound Opinions’s site or read it below.
Greg: I do Jim. I am glad we are getting a chance to do a segment like this, because we saw so many great bands at SXSW that we did not get a chance to mention at our official SXSW music festival show. This is one of those bands that I was not able to get at the first time around, but I did see them in Austin, Texas – incredibly well worth it. All the way from Poland, they don’t come to America much. I think this might have been be their visit here, I could be wrong about that but certainly the first time I saw them.
Jim: One of the lands of your heritage?.
Greg: Yes indeed. Trupa Trupa is the name of the band. That translates into Corpse Corpse. You’ve got some very dark humor here, if you can call it humor at all, sometimes the line is blurred between what is humorous and what is really dire. The singer in the band Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a poet. He is a published poet, and right away you might think: a pretentious guy. No. It is really pithy poetry, really funny, really dark, in the way that only an East European poet can be. This is a man who brings a band to town and the guitar player fashioned his guitar out of an empty fuel can. It reminded me lot of that East European post-punk scene: Plastic People of the Universe, Půlnoc those kind of bands in that vain, dark progressive psychedelic songs with this really pithy poetic word play. That was a terrific combination that certainly worked for me. Their third album is called „Jolly New Songs”. They are certainly not jolly. They are new songs, but hey are not jolly. And a song called „To me”. I talked about the poet in the band – he annunciates exactly three words in the entire song and repeats them but they are very powerful words. In the context of the song they become even more powerful.