REVIEW: Trona, Red River (Roadrunner/Cherry Disc)
- Sean Eric McGill
As a child, I grew up on Hee-Haw. Every Saturday at 6 p.m., my father would drag us away from whatever we were doing to watch the funny exploits of a bunch of good ole' boys and girls. Maybe it was because my dad looked like Roy Clark - I dunno - but suffice to say, I watched that show until I was in my mid-teens; usually against my will.
Don't fret - this does have something to do with Trona and their album Red River. It seems they choice to cover the Buck Owens classic "Take Me Back Again" (for those of you scoring at home, Buck was the one who "was pickin'"), and while I admit there's no soft spot for country music in my heart, I was initially concerned. I don't mind a cover of a song, but I'm not fond of covering a song and going completely away from the source material just for a laugh.
So I popped in Red River and started from the beginning. Thirty-nine minutes and ten great songs later, we get to "Take Me Back Again" - and Trona nails it, right down to the steel guitar. I was dumbfounded to say the least. Here's a band that, over the course of their album, do occasionally flirt with a country sound (most notably on "Red River") - but to hear them flat-out nail a country song intrigued me.
Made of up former members of Orangutang, Barnies and Sunspots, Trona's sound isn't one you can pin down. There's "Driving Record", which just begs to be played on alternative rock radio, but then you find a song like "Red River" and "Take Me Back", which throws you back from labeling them a "alternative" group.
Or maybe it doesn't. Perhaps Trona is what "alternative rock" was always meant to be: an alternative to the mainstream. And now that the mainstream sounds more like what was once the alternative than ever before, Trona is perhaps just what we need - a band who puts songwriting ahead of image, and just delivers a good, solid record. And while a song like "Sail Into the Storm" didn't really catch my own personal fancy, it was still better than most of the work I've heard lately.
Red River is a great album, full of good hooks and strong melodies, and deserves a listen if you're even remotely interested in what happens when a band does what they want on an album instead of what some record company thinks they should do. But that's one of the strongest things about the Roadrunner catalog - from the metal of Soulfly to the quasi-bluegrass of Blue Mountain, they're a record company who honestly seems more concerned with an artist than with a trend.
Oh yeah - the stuff with "Hee Haw" - sorry, I just can't afford a therapist right now.
