Release Date: February 28, 2012
Trust is an electronic goth band from Toronto, Canada. If you were to listen to this album and look at the album cover without any outside information you would most certainly believe that the band consisted of one overweight, white face makeup abusing, black hair dyed Goth freak that could be both male, female, or both.
However, Trust is a boy/girl two piece. They’ve been associated with acts like Crystal Castles and Death From Above 1979 but don’t have as much energy as either of them and it’s actually not the worst thing. Trust isn’t minimalist in their songwriting having only two members, but they certainly take it slow.
Every song on their debut LP, TRST, is built with essentially all the same building blocks. Each song has a simple beat, then some very simplistic synths appear during the verse that are looped until the chorus, then the vocals come in and bleed out some lines and then it all happens over again.
Every song on this album is very good at making the same sort of sound for each song and it works. Each song builds up into a dance-y sort of track that makes you want to move your body. However, mainstream audiences will most likely be turned off by the vocals on this album. It almost sounds like the character Marilyn Manson played in Party Monster is singing every single one of these songs, barely sober enough to remember the lyrics and have the strength to keep pushing air out of their lungs.
It’s this sort of distance in the vocals and lyrics that make this music so appealing. The vocals being almost forced out of the singer gives an added dissonance to the album that most electronic music can’t reach.
Most of the time over electronic beats you hear a sexy girl saying something totally irrelevant or redundant over and over again like, “I love to fly” and this album is far from that. This incredible disconnect is what makes lines like “You can’t believe in nothing, we believe in nothing” in “This Ready Flesh” stick out and make you think for a second.
For what it’s worth, this album is a collection of songs that all sound relatively the same. None of them break out of the verse, chorus, verse format in the least. This isn’t to their disadvantage for the most part. Most of these songs are very groovy and appetizing electronic tracks, but there are also some filler tracks that get lost in the mix.
Trust – TRST tracklist:
- “Shoom”
- “Dressed for Space”
- “Bulbform”
- “The Last Dregs”
- “Candy Walls”
- “Gloryhole”
- “This Ready Flesh”
- “F.T.F.”
- “Heaven”
- “Chrissy E”
- “Sulk”
