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Tolchock Trio
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Ghosts Don't Have Bones
Red Triangle Records
Release: 4/20/2004
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Rated:
Review by:
Jason Warner
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Ghosts Don't Have Bones is the latest album
from the great rock band known as Tolchock Trio. Tolchock
is a verb meaning: to hit. The band's name comes from
Stanley Kubrick's classic tale of ultra violence, A Clockwork
Orange. The album is not ultra violent, but it will make you
sit up and take notice.
In 2003, the readers of the Salt Lake City
Weekly voted Tolchock Trio's debut album,
Hello Bird, album of the year. In 2004
Tolchock Trio again took home the imaginary prize by
winning album of the year with Ghosts Don't Have
Bones. Hello
Bird was a great album, but for my money
Ghosts Don't Have Bones is twice as good. The
band has been together since 2000 when drummer, Dan
Thomas, relocated to Salt Lake City from Minneapolis to join
old friend, Oliver Lewis (guitars, bass, vocals), and Ryan
Fedor (guitar, vocals) to form a band that was supposed to
sound like a mix between Wilco and My Bloody Valentine.
The band has always had a huge local following and that
could be due in part to the fact that Tolchock Trio are some
of the nicest guys you will ever meet, but I for one believe
their acclaim, both in the local press, and on the tongues of
the local scenesters, lies in the fact that their music is so
consistently good. Ghosts Don't Have Bones
only acts as evidence of this fact. The songs are solid, good
listening.
In addition to displays of musical proficiency, of which there
is plenty, Tolchock Trio shows a sensibility for the art of the
song for the song's sake. The songs are artistic and that
same sense of creation went into the mixing of the album.
One track, "Tolchock Riot" is a recording engineer's
nightmare, with everything in the red a good majority of the
time. The clipping is so intense you will wonder if you are in
a nightmare of some old time barber shop with the man
wielding the razor just a little too close to your neck skin.
Ghosts Don't Have Bones is not about
whimsical experimentation though. It is an album more
about a group of musicians seeing how far they can push
themselves in any given direction, whether it be in the
crafting of songs or the destruction of those same songs.
You may feel a little like you just watched A Clockwork
Orange after listening to "Tolchock Riot," but then the boys
return to earth (or the moon), with such standout tracks as,
"Hornets," a ping-pong exchange of singing between Lewis
and Fedor, all the while with Thomas banging out his
precision beats, or the poetic, "Goose," a song about the
current state of real estate on the earth's largest satellite.
No matter the track, Tolchock Trio knows how to rock out,
and they know how to make your ears bleed.
Tolchock Trio is a busy group. When the various members
are not practicing or performing with this group, each one
plays in at least one other band. This leads me to ponder
the question, if this group can make music this good while
splitting their time with other groups (not to mention day
jobs, school, etc.), what could they accomplish if they
focused only on this group? It's a possibility the world will
likely never know as we know how incestuous local music
scenes become over time, but it seems Tolchock Trio is
doing fine within the allotted time and with an album as good
as Ghosts Don't Have Bones, for me to ask for
more would be plain greedy. |
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