In the '70s and '80s, the underground seemed to be crawling with scrappy,
Beefheart
-influenced bands that mixed art rock expansiveness with a welcome dose of weirdness. From
the Hampton Grease Band
to
Men & Volts
and the misleadingly named
Polkaholics
, these sonic adventurers proved that you could be progressive without being ponderous, or sacrificing an ounce of viscerality. From the '90s on, that subsection of the indie rock fringe seemed to dwindle, and even in the post-
Animal Collective
era of experimentalists like
Deerhunter
,
Dirty Projectors
, et al., alt-leaning art rock rejects edginess for relative refinement. Swimming against that tide, however, are
Trawler Bycatch
, a stubborn trio of iconoclasts from Portland, OR. The band is fronted by singer/guitarist
Zach Dellorto Blackwell
, who also plays bass for proggy hard rockers
Danava
, and he's not the only one switching axes -- bassist
Russ Archer
is the former guitarist for space rockers
SubArachnoid Space
. With
Zach Nelson
on drums -- yes, two
Zachs
in one band --
turn out a twirling tornado of angular riffs, contorted grooves, and quirky tunes on their debut album. On tracks like
"Singing Grass,"
the proceedings overtly evoke vintage
Captain Beefheart
, with raw-throated vocals, barbed-wire guitar lines, and willfully spastic rhythms. But while the
flavor is a key element throughout the album, it's hardly the only one.
"Initial Melody,"
for instance, finds
-- incidentally, the name is a fishing term -- evoking
Akron/Family
channeling
Sun Ra
, with unison vocal chants riding atop carefully crafted cacophony, and the fiendish fuzztones of
Red
-era
King Crimson
rise up at numerous points, particularly on
"Heaving Through the Seasons."
Schlep'm
might not fit the knee-jerk definition of prog rock, but it's undeniably progressive, in the literal sense. ~ J. Allen