Trailer Trash Tracys: Althaea

Description

Over the course of their lush, strange, defiantly unclassifiable sophomore album 'Althaea,' London duo Trailer Trash Tracys condense a number of disparate styles into music that thrillingly broaches the void between figuration and abstraction. 

While undeniably beautiful and quite often infectious in parts, this is certainly not pop music by any traditional definition; rather, it appeals to the more intuitive of mind and wild at heart. More than simply becoming a philosophical exercise however, the result is their most ambitious and idiosyncratic body of work to date, one which operates at the very limits of what pop music can be.

Their debut, 'Ester,' released in 2012, manifested the band's approach to making music as a fine balance between chaos and order, laying out a dense and dreamlike ecosystem of Sufi poetry, Solfeggio scales and, floating above it all, Susanne Aztoria's otherworldly yet emotionally charged vocals. 

Early singles such as "Strangling Good Guys" and "You Wish You Were Red" proved to be outliers – rather than simply making lo-fi dream pop, the band were instead aiming for something far more subconscious and esoteric, extracting the essence of a perfect pop song and recasting it in a different light entirely. 

"It cemented what we are about musically: diverse, cinematic and with a pop curiosity," the band muse now. "Making it was a very important process for us – 'Althaea' sounding more mature like it does probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for 'Ester's mistakes and beauty." 

Spanning 10 deeply esoteric tracks, 'Althaea' sees the band drift futher afield from traditional song structures to create a new aural lexicon of their own, one as influenced by Filipino carnival music and Latin rhythms as it was by Japanese tropical music from the 80s. The songs demonstrate a characteristic fusion of melody and dissonance, but this time round, they are more amorphous in the way they occupy space, neatly colliding the elegance of modernism with sharply futuristic structures.