Over the past couple of years, we've heard a lot of new indie rock bands playing charming, low-tech music like the last 10 years-- or 20, or 30 years-- never happened: Vivian Girls, Real Estate, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, etc. Some of these bands try to take their old influences in new directions, and some don't bother. (Now that I'm thinking about retro, I'm thinking about Folgers Coffee ads: Tonight, we're secretly replacing this noisy cassette-label band from the mid-80s with something that came out last week-- let's see if people know the difference, or if they care.)
Trash Kit are three British girls who are single-mindedly faithful to a very specific style born in the late 1970s: small-scale, distortion-free punk like the Slits and the Raincoats. Guitar, bass, drums. Not too many overdubs; nothing too professional (professionalism, in their case, being a handicap). What made their influences sacred is their sense of kinship and solidarity: sometimes, everyone plays on the same beat; sometimes, songs speed up and slow down; sometimes, they sing in unison. The emphasis is on togetherness. I hesitate to get too mystical about it, but these are bands that tap into musical communication in a borderline-tribal way-- it's like twin language, spoken with wooden spoons on pots and pans.
Trash Kit-- their debut-- is a brief, spirited album. There are 17 songs, and it's 27 minutes long. One typical pattern for a pop song is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus. A typical Trash Kit song is verse. Just verse. Or maybe they spend thirty seconds revving up together and then they play the verse. The band plays like they're chasing down their own songs. Sometimes, they skin their knees.
The music is scrappy, but also sweet, almost domestic. (This is a juxtaposition that the Raincoats-- who wrote songs like "Fairytale in the Supermarket"-- understood, too.) One of the girls in the band is a PhD student. They have a song called "Bad Books," which is one minute and five seconds long, and goes, "In the library, that's where you'll find me. Bad books! Dirty looks! Bad books! Dirty looks!" On "Fame"-- maybe the catchiest and most coherent thing you could call a "song" on the album-- they sing, "We ride the Megabus, we're all famous now!" This is them at their best: direct, playful, and passionately unsophisticated.
I would hate if any of this made them sound cute, "cute" being a word that most people usually use when they want to emphasize how insignificant and pettable something is. Trash Kit work within their own world, which is small, but pretense-free. Presumably, they have hard times and deep thoughts like anyone, but none of it ever comes up-- instead, they retreat into these little games of musical four-square. Overall, there are times I want more from the album-- more verve, more yip, more small challenges. And while the thought of all these young, backward-looking bands makes me vaguely depressed, there's something about Trash Kit that I find heartening: Instead of treating their retro style of choice like an outfit picked from a closet, they treat it like unfinished business.
