There are those people who come up with a personality to deal with performing live on stage and those that have always had it lying in wait for the day when they would start a band. Radio Shock's M*P* Lockwood probably has always been a performer, getting weird from day one in every part of his day. Traveling to gigs via a greyhound, the band is made up of whatever equipment he can carry along, he doesn't use a mic and the audience usually ends up finishing the set playing the setup while M*P* looks on. It's a crazy mess of a sound that changes every show, to even commit this to vinyl is impossible, nailing down the performance and vocals to this time and place and you only get a small window into the process and performance of this conceptual project.
A-Side's "Trapper Keeper" is a jacked up mixed bag of riffs, the guitars seem to be falling apart and slightly coming back together in ever devolving rhythms. It's looped, slapped together pop chaos with a drum machine just blindly flailing away in perfect time. Throw in bass, low end no effects and M*P* on vocals is way off in the distance with a cheap mic here, making an appearance but this chorus of thundery cheap chords blowing in saying TRAPPER KEEPER makes perfect sense. It's the very song manifestation of that office supply object. Shiny, injected with gel glitter and smacked right out of your hands the first day. The crowd from the Savage Weekend audience gets involved to provide that crazy riot sound of the masses praying to the TRAPPER KEEPER! Like some kind of blood crazed gladiator, this pulse continues to pound while they jump around yelling the name of this essential middle school item.
B-Sides "Imagine Yourself As Me" is a Wolf Eyes cover which clued me in as to where this whole single would be going checking out the reverse of this sleeve. Regular machine beat and who doesn't want this kind of regularity? He's probably going more minimal than Mr. Dilloway with his heavy, guitar as loud as possible in the mix with pieces of feedback and high pitch squeals of electronics . It's palming chords right down the neck over and over in a maddening primal way with a beat that will continue to thump away in a plastic broken speaker for the rest of its days. Guest vocal from Admiral Grey's high falsetto while the guitar breaks into junkyard scrap, spiraling in finger dynamics. Crazy glitches buried in here. He's got a snarly growl behind this hypnotizing beat, overcompensating for the monotony. It's dark in an unintentional way like if you raised a child in a dim cave with the first drum machine and guitar on Killing Joke and Digital Leather.
On dark green clear vinyl and cover art of the year from Decoherence Records.
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