Schlep'm

In the `70s and `80s, the underground seemed to be crawling with scrappy, Beefheart-influenced bands that mixed art rock expansiveness with a welcome dose of weirdness. From the Hampton Grease Band to Men & Volts and the misleadingly named Polkaholics, these sonic adventurers proved that you could be progressive without being ponderous, or sacrificing an ounce of viscerality. From the `90s on, that subsection of the indie rock fringe seemed to dwindle, and even in the post-Animal Collective era of experimentalists like Deerhunter, Dirty Projectors, et al., alt-leaning art rock rejects edginess for relative refinement. Swimming against that tide, however, are Trawler Bycatch, a stubborn trio of iconoclasts from Portland, OR. The band is fronted by singer/guitarist Zach Dellorto Blackwell, who also plays bass for proggy hard rockers Danava, and he's not the only one switching axes -- bassist Russ Archer is the former guitarist for space rockers SubArachnoid Space. With Zach Nelson on drums -- yes, two Zachs in one band -- Trawler Bycatch turn out a twirling tornado of angular riffs, contorted grooves, and quirky tunes on their debut album. On tracks like "Singing Grass," the proceedings overtly evoke vintage Captain Beefheart, with raw-throated vocals, barbed-wire guitar lines, and willfully spastic rhythms. But while the Beefheart flavor is a key element throughout the album, it's hardly the only one. "Initial Melody," for instance, finds Trawler Bycatch -- incidentally, the name is a fishing term -- evoking Akron/Family channeling Sun Ra, with unison vocal chants riding atop carefully crafted cacophony, and the fiendish fuzztones of Red-era King Crimson rise up at numerous points, particularly on "Heaving Through the Seasons." Schlep'm might not fit the knee-jerk definition of prog rock, but it's undeniably progressive, in the literal sense. ~ J. Allen