Transfusao Noise Records, Brazil
Rating: 69
by Carlos Reyes
You must give it to Lê Almeida for keeping Transfusão Noise Records as faithful to noise punk as it has been over the years. Most producers would’ve polished the sound by now, but Lê Almeida's entrepreneurship subscribes all of his tapes to the same agency of short-lived, raptured sonoridade. The Brazilian imprint’s sense of brotherhood is evident in all its releases. Bands like Treli Feli Repi, Wallace Costa, and our favorite, Babe Florida, share so much in their approach to their music that it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart. You won’t have that problem with Trash No Star, a band that stands at another wavelength of intensity and whose mostly-female vocals stick out.
Self-proclaimed feminists, Trash No Star (under the production assistance of Lê Almeida) present a disarray of riot grrrl shoutings. In some numbers, the band excels at discharging urgency, and on others, they fall into plot-holes of social exhaustions. When a band chooses to bluntly ask, “Hey how are you bitch?” on the first track of their record, you know they’re looking for your attention. In the following track "Let's Go," the three-member band bolds its power and speed if only to go into a vocal rumbling of nothingness and absoluteness. Divisive bands like Descartes A Kant and Le Butcherettes share the same line of attack, but fail to provide the warmth that a band like Trash No Star offers. The first two tracks of Stay Creepy (no) Summer Hits are nothing more than personalized templates, but serve the band with the accreditation to wonder on more challenging (if not less traveled) lands on the rest of the EP.
If we had to go through a semi-jarring provocation like that of “Let’s Go” to get to something as deeply staggering to the sense as the meta-vocal chorus of “Miss Me” then it was all worth it. We could accuse Trash No Star of revivalist mimicry and working with overly simple lyrics like we did to Hawaiian Gremlins recently, but what makes the Brazilian act more convincing is the absence of posture and self-glorification. Not to mention the topics of a phantom summer romance increase the chances for careful, repeated listens. At around ten minutes long, Stay Creepy is still hard to hold on to. Particularly as there’s not much room for scatter and dispersion to happen –both sonic developments that have elevated contemporary bands like Selma Oxor and Las Robertas to the next league. Not that Trash No Star would care to sound like their contemporaries, as confessed in the album, they belong to a “Lost Generation” and choose to be completely unapologetic about it.