By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the classic power pop trimmings of Beauty’s I’D DO ALMOST ANYTHING FOR YOU and the thundering slowcore of Trembler’s TOTAL SORRY!
Beauty – I’D DO ALMOST ANYTHING FOR YOU
Genre: Power Pop, Pop Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Daisy,” “You Always Take Me,” “Let It Ring!”
It’s clear where Beauty’s hearts lie — or, rather, when their hearts lie. Everything about the Red Bank, NJ, trio seems ripped right from the ‘60s, from the sterling harmonies to the jangly riffs, right down to that artwork. You can hear shades of anyone from the Who and the Beach Boys to Big Star and Cheap Trick to Teenage Fanclub and Fountains of Wayne in I’D DO ALMOST ANYTHING FOR YOU, but at no point throughout these 25 minutes does Beauty fall into pale imitation.
They sound, instead, inspired — revitalizing the style rather than merely retreading it — and the results are charming. “I keep waiting all night for the phone to ring / I don’t hear anything,” goes the chorus to album highlight “Let It Ring!” It’s quaint, and this sort of doe-eyed innocence carries through much of the rest of the LP. “Where’d you get those eyes?” and “My heart is sticking to you like glue” and “I love you, Cherry Red / for being you” are representative samples, and the music is as sweet as the almost childlike perspective on love.
The bridge to the surfy “Daisy” is full of handclaps and “ooh baby”s, and every verse of that song could be a hook. The harmonies all over “Figure It Out” make every line pop — all the backing vocals across I’D DO ALMOST ANYTHING FOR YOU really help sell it, actually, from the brief “do-do-do-do” that crops up in the second verse of “You Always Take Me” to the overlapping hooks at the end of “Let It Ring!”
It’s not all hooks, though; there’s a sense of showmanship to the instrumentation too. Guitar solos abound: one in “Acid Baby Girl,” one in “You Always Take Me,” one in “Figure It Out,” and two in “Polar Bear Ice Cream,” just in case the first wasn’t good enough. The riffs, even when they aren’t so theatrical, are just as infectious as the vocal melodies, “You Always Take Me” and “Figure It Out” in particular. Pick up I’D DO ALMOST ANYTHING FOR YOU on Bandcamp and hit the boardwalk, snowstorm be damned.
Trembler – TOTAL SORRY
Genre: Slowcore, Indie Rock
Favorite Track: “Love Leave the Body”
Trembler has mellowed with age. Gone are any traces of the metal and hardcore influence from 2019’s TREMBLER, any aggression that lingered from 2021’s FOLDING totally stripped away. The bouts of fuzz that colored their previous releases are mostly absent from TOTAL SORRY too; the one real connective thread is the tempos, which remain as languorous as ever.
The opening “Sugar” is the biggest departure from the earlier Trembler material. A feminine voice recites a spoken word monologue about loss and loneliness, about “hydrogen bombs and online shopping” over hypnotic plucked strings; over the track’s four-and-a-half minutes, the accompaniment is gradually overtaken by increasingly aggressive feedback. “Oh my God,” the voice repeats throughout the track. “The world folded in on itself,” says the voice, as the music seems to do the same.
Nothing else on TOTAL SORRY approaches the claustrophobic dread of “Sugar,” but the title track that follows comes closest. A hazy dirge, the song is punctuated by creaks and squeals that almost sound like incidental music, an effect of wind rattling the recording studio; around the three-minute mark, “Total Sorry” opens outward, percussion beating like a death march as the guitars swell. It feels like an ominous prelude to a collapse, and perhaps on an earlier album it might’ve been, but instead Trembler pulls back, and the song ends as gently as it began. Despite the oppressive atmosphere of the first nine minutes of the EP — nearly half its running time! — these still manage to be Trembler’s most inviting songs yet. Even the title track wrings a sneakily catchy hook out of one of the EP’s prettiest vocal runs.
In the same way that “Sugar” and “Total Sorry” pair together, “The Gonzalez Shoulder” and “Wilt” make for a sensible pairing. Trembler settles into down-the-middle slowcore here, the former taking cues from peers like Downward and Knifeplay in the way its sluggish pace belies its thunderous climax. On “Wilt,” TOTAL SORRY’s lone single, they resist that impulse, placidly twisting a sweet melody over stuttering instrumentation. Rather than relying on grand dynamic shifts, “Wilt” is more subtle, built on a loping riff that varies slightly with each repetition.
All that pent-up energy is released on the very next track. “Love Leave the Body” closes TOTAL SORRY on an upbeat note; it’s an overdriven rocker that wastes no time with its towering chorus. Trembler allows a moment to breathe during the song’s sparse bridge, but once they’ve regained their composure, they come back harder than ever. Vocalist/guitarist/drummer Luke Gonzales has said that the intention with “Love Leave the Body” was to end TOTAL SORRY with a song that “returns the band to the familiar Trembler sound,” but few Trembler songs before have ever had this sort of fiery energy — the song also allegedly “nods towards where we are headed next.” If the next LP synthesizes this style with their older, more confrontational sound, it should be a knockout. Trembler’s come a long way since TREMBLER, and TOTAL SORRY’s their best release yet. Pick it up on Bandcamp.
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