Caustic Resin
Trick Question
[Alias]
Rating: 2.4
For the entirety of their career, the boys in Caustic Resin have been second
class citizens of the indie rock nation. Despite having played on some of Built
to Spill's classic LPs, releasing four albums, and crafting some pretty damn
good songs, Caustic Resin will forever remain "the second best band in Boise"
to all but a handful of rabid Resin fans. Well, if any album were set to shake
up these guys' image, it'd be their latest release, Trick Question. Sadly,
though, changing your image is not necessarily the same as improving it.
This time around, Caustic Resin take some serious risks by purposefully
downplaying most of the elements that tie them back to their contemporary rock
brethren. On Trick Question, the band has picked out a set of rules
to play by with all the interest and anticipation of a person picking out their
clothes for the day. Unfortunately, the musical outlines they choose to follow
are the ones for psychedelic stadium rock and early heavy metal-- styles best
left to the 1970's.
Although you have to admire the girth of this trio's balls, the end product is
blatantly forced and painfully uninspired. Throughout this album, Caustic Resin
come off like a Pink Floyd cover band with Tony Iommi on guitars and The Pepsi
Girl working the vocals. Heavy, leaden, cliched guitar parts are the focal point
f each track, but the band's flashy licks and drawn- out solos more closely
resemble the wailing of the damned than Metallica's Master of Puppets.
Yet, true to the spilt nature of this album, Caustic Resin has discovered a way to
take the manliest of all music instruments-- the electric guitar-- and rip out all
of its muscle. In the meantime, the drumming is simply present, while the band's
poor attempts as creativity-- the peppering of pianos, turntables and found sound--
are mediocre at best and laughable at worst. To add to the fun, frontman Brett
Nelson's lyrics seem to have been copied straight out of a 9th grader's poetry-
infected notebooks.
Topping off this triple layer shitcake are Nelson's vocals. On each of the songs,
no matter the tempo, tone, or subject matter, Brett finds new and inventive ways
to make his voice as grating as chewing a mouthful of tin foil. I don't know what
the guy was thinking when he chose to be a professional singer, but it sure as hell
wasn't, "You know, I can really sing." Despite decent tracks like "Nice Wings
You've Got There" and "Road Block," Nelson's warble, drenched tactlessly in delay
and reverb, destroys any conceivable enjoyment that would have otherwise been
extractable. And songs that were bad to begin with-- like "Slide," a six minute,
thirty- nine second- long Soundgarden-esque dirge, become un-fucking-bearable.
Trick Question just doesn't fit together, I tell ya. Not in any way, at
any time. The polarized nature of the music is interesting (particularly how
each song can be as dark and messy as a lump of coal, yet still manage to float
lightly around the listener), but it's also stale and uninteresting. If it's
meant to be a rock record, it comes off way too hazy to cut the mustard. If it's
meant to be a psychedelic record, it's too dumb and heavy- handed for its own good.
If it's supposed to sound like this, I don't know what to tell you.
-Steven Byrd