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Distant Trains Congratulations on Your Suicide SOTF 016 June 29, 2010 |
Digital $8.00 |
Stream
Futile
Track List
1. Take Care
2. Desert
3. Sketches
4. DDDE
5. ABX
6. Futile
7. 62MF
Album Description
Congratulations on Your Suicide is the debut effort from the Des Moines artist Distant Trains. Featuring spacey, dreamy and fuzzed-out effects to drum machine beats, songwriter Chuck Hoffman's DIY approach to recording and production emphasizes his experimental nature.
Notes
All songs were written and performed by Chuck Hoffman.
Press
Distant Trains is the solo project of Iowa musician Chuck Hoffman, who plays in Des Moines band Why Make Clocks, among other varied musical projects around the state. Web developer by day, rock and roll animal by night, Chuck is the sort of musician who keeps the Iowa rock scene exciting: he knows everyone, has been in a band with almost everyone, and he’ll be down front at your show grinning and head-nodding, even if he has to work in the morning.
Congratulations On Your Suicide is a departure from the last CD-R I heard by him, which was a collection of sunny, up-tempo pop songs, roughed up with lo fi samples. Hoffman’s bass guitar dominates this album, both as a pure sine rumble and as a fuzzed out lead instrument. The songs owe a debt to sludge-rockers like Soundgarden and the Melvins, but Hoffman is more of a surrealist, incorporating cruddy samples of evangelists on the monumental “DDDE,” which sounds like the fade-out of the Beatles “I Want You” played at the wrong speed. “ABX” combines a herky-jerky drum machine beat with a muffled vocal before breaking down into rumbling and whispers.
“When did you finally realize you were grown?” Hoffman asks at the beginning of “62MF” and it’s an open question. There’s nothing childish about Congratulations’ songwriting; Hoffman has an ear for satisfying riffs that develop and modulate, and while he loves his distortion pedals he never uses them to screech or scream. He retains a childlike affection for the direct sensual pleasure of sonic texture–loud, soft, distorted, pure, all dancing together.
Distorted bass guitar with clean drum
programming and wandering keys on top. Plus vocal. “Take Care” is
like a doom metal version of Soul Whirling Somewhere. And the bursts
of bluesy guitar, I should not be enjoying this. The production can
be summed up in two words: clean scuzz. Just like the early work of
one of my favorite bands, Idaho. “Desert” is probably more like
Queens Of The Stone Age, maybe? I enjoy the distorto-bass
guitar-forward songwriting, vocals waaaaay off over there in the
semi-background. The elements are familiar, but the picture is still
pretty.
-Ian C Stewart