By and large, music critics are a petty, sadistic little bastard-clan. And why shouldn't we be? Musicians get to create art, to distill their perceptions, their emotions, their fancies into an aural essence; we just get to call it something. So call it something we do, naming, classifying, pigeonholing, assigning sub-sub-genres with wild glee and barely concealed malice. Math-rock. Slo-core. "Sports metal," for Christ's sake. An artist spends 18 months cramming every dollop of exhaustively analyzed perception regarding human nature into 11 tracks of visceral sonic catharsis? I think I'll call it "post-swing." Take that, you talented fucker.
"I do think there's a trend toward compartmentalizing or over-labeling music, not just in indie-rock, but everywhere. It's partially your fault, the journalists," agrees Trans Am keyboardist/vocalist Nathan "Natron" Means. But only up to a point. "It happens everywhere. It's a marketing technique, trying to get people to identify."
One might deem Means the wrong person to ask. After all, his Bethesda, Md.-based trio has been confounding critics' attempts at categorization for more than six years now. They're a hot topic during our regularly scheduled Internet videoconferencing forums all the time. Just when we think we've got 'em pegged as irreverent anti-rock upstarts, they start fiddling about with more synths. Or incorporate more vocals. Or, as they did on last year's killer Red Line, write a few songs of suspiciously traditional structure. It pisses us scribes off, y'know? So finally, in a fit of pique, we settled on tossing them in with virtually every other group on the adventurous Thrill Jockey label, not many of whom really sound that much alike. Certainly, none of them exude as much of an "actual rock band" feel as Trans Am. Whatever. Call it post-rock. Gotcha.
"I don't care about it too much anymore," Means says. "I mean, anybody who sees us play will realize that we don't sound anything like Tortoise."
He's got us there. Short of our calling an all-night cram session/slumber party in order to come up with something even dumber-sounding and more vague than "emo," the threesome remain tantalizingly amorphous. Most current groups that deconstruct the cliches and conventions of rock, or just screw around with the instrumental/aesthetic/technologydynamic, come off as frigid science or a bad joke. Trans Am provide meat with their gray matter. As exploratory and pop-subversive as they can be, Means, multi-instrumentalist Phil Manley and percussionist Sebastian Thomson also throw off an organic, human vibe. Plus, they rock on stage, eschewing most of their peers' remote self-absorption, admitting instead that they like to have a good time.
"I don't think (Trans Am) is completely selfish; it's pretty selfish," laughs Means, "but it's much more fun for us if the rest of the people in the room seem to be having a pretty good time. If you see a band and they just look completely bored onstage, the odds that you're going to have a good time at their concert are pretty slim. It works both ways — if we're having a good time, there's a much better chance that everybody else will too."
The band's latest recording continues the trend of true experimentation with engaging results. It's a split CD-EP with San Francisco's similarly iconoclastic instrumental metal/prog-rock satirists The Fucking Champs. The two bands again defy convention by collaborating on all songs, rather than each contributing their own. The Champs kicked things off by recording some basic tracks, then sent the tapes across the country to Trans Am's studio on the outskirts of D.C. to see how they would embellish and finalize them.
"It was such a long time ago, I can't really pinpoint the origin of the whole thing," Means disremembers. "We had played a bunch of shows with 'em over the past four years, after we first heard their music. We got along really well, and really liked their music, and we both have access to studios — we both have our own, one on each coast.
"We figured the easiest thing to do would be to send the reels back and forth. It was fun, and it only took two years," he says with a laugh. "They would send us half of a completed song. It's kind of like a word game or something, where you start a phrase and everybody has to add a word. You get this really weird sentence at the end, or something totally garbled. You have no idea how it's going to come out."
The resulting five-track Double Exposure, released by Thrill Jockey and credited to TransChamps, contains obvious elements of both groups' styles, yet is just as clearly something neither outfit would ever come up with alone. The Fucking Champs' metallic dual harmony guitars and thick rhythmic foundations are streamlined by Trans Am's simple, repetitive hooks, while the latter band finds its naturally focused delivery textured by the former's ambitious classical/progressive bent. Only two tunes feature vocals, and the cuts careen from insinuating synths and jarring percussion to string-section codas and Thin Lizzy-style leads. As a whole, Double Exposure is a joyfully scattered exercise; a full-length might have proven distracting, but this brief foray manages to intrigue throughout.
Double Exposure's release, besides being a welcome break from recording their next full-length disc, has found Trans Am on the road again. An exception to the generally true stereotype that progressive bands are pasty, antisocial studio shut-ins, the trio has always boasted a worldwide touring schedule that makes River City High look like Steely Dan. Just don't expect them to perform any of the new EP's rule-snapping interactions — in a recent five weeks of touring together, Trans Am and The Champs performed only one of Double Exposure's songs, and only once, as an encore on their last night. Means and company prefer to let the record stand on its own as a collaborative effort.
"The few things that we could pull off ourselves, we didn't practice," he jokes.
You can, however, expect to hear tunes from Trans Am's highly anticipated next full-length. When quizzed about forthcoming sounds, Means confirms that Red Line's more straightforward moments, surprisingly, reveal a more traditional direction for the band.
"I think we definitely tried our best not to buck convention on our new album," he says. "I don't really know how successful we were, but we definitely tried to write much more poppy songs, that have choruses and verses, that don't last more than four minutes.
"I guess a lot of the things we do are a result of being bored, or reacting against the thing we did last."
Good. Maybe now we music critics can find a cozy little name for what they do.
Scott Harrell can be reached by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2001.