Most serious music fans have a fantasy in their minds wherein they discover a lost masterpiece that no one else seems to know about. There are certainly plenty of them out there to be found-- most music fails to get even decent distribution, things are marooned in home countries with tiny populations, and sometimes records are just overlooked or misunderstood in their day. If you were to stumble across them in a dusty old crate, it would be tempting to trumpet Bobb Trimble's two albums as lost masterpieces, and to a certain kind of music fan they are, but to most people they will play more as interesting, occasionally superb curiosities.
Trimble hailed from Marborough, Mass., and was part of nearby Worcester's late-1970s/early-80s "Wormtown" scene, which comprised mostly punk bands who played very different music from what he was trying to do. Loosely, Trimble falls in the psychedelic loner category of American fringe music, alongside guys like Rick Saucedo, D.R. Hooker, and Faine Jade. He wrote melodic songs and had a high, pinched, somewhat feminine voice that gives his work an almost alien quality, especially given the way it fits into the haunting atmosphere of his compositions.
Though he was essentially making what constituted pop music in his head (but wouldn't in most people's minds), he seemed to have a grasp of his inevitable outsider status. Case in point: his first album cover featured a cheap studio shot of him in front of a microphone, holding a Gibson SG guitar with the pick guard removed and a Thompson submachine gun. Iron Curtain Innocence is an imaginative debut sprinkled with a few excellent songs and a number of interesting sonic combinations. It's not brilliant, but it is strangely captivating.
Trimble's drumming was rudimentary at best, which means most of the songs are smeared across the tape at very slow tempos. His guitar playing, on the other hand, was quite good, and he wrote unique chord progressions that heightened the sense of nervousness and lurking danger of his songs. His voice was his other great musical asset, and he did everything he could think to do with it-- harmonizing his melodies, layering himself in the background, trying out various primitive processing methods, and generally using it as a mood engine to crank up the level of paranoia already suggested by the rest of the music. Bits of craggy Moog and fuzz guitar pop up here and there, as do dollops of xylophone, backwards masking, and all manner of sound effects, from radio transmissions to cars starting.
The real gems from the debut album are the fuzzed-out psych march "When the Raven Calls", and "One Mile From Heaven", a gentle, mostly acoustic song with a beautiful chorus that showcases his falsetto at its best. Trimble's second album, 1982's aptly named Harvest of Dreams, uses many of the same musical elements as the first, but the songs are a bit stronger and his grasp of atmosphere had developed considerably. That didn't stop him from including "Oh Baby", a bizarre track featuring Trimble and the Kidds, a band of pre-adolescent children he briefly fronted. Half the track is backward, and the part that's played forward is hardly any less odd, with its kid vocals and shaky drums.
Highlights on Harvest of Dreams include "Premonitions: the Fantasy", which features his doubled falsetto and sounds like a lost Big Star or Chris Bell solo session with a bit of recorder and harmonica added on, and "Armour of the Shroud", a dark song cut through with dial tones and cold xylophone phrases. The guitar is processed to sound almost like a vacuum cleaner at certain points, and the vocals wander in and out of processing as Trimble calls for "God [to] save the dreamers." It's dark and implacably weird, but Trimble is so obviously earnest and working toward a vision on these recordings that you can't help coming away charmed.
Judging by the demos tacked on to the end of the disc, Trimble was only getting better at his craft when he hung it up, ensuring that his albums would pass into legend for psychedelic and outsider music fans, changing hands for grotesque sums of money. Secretly Canadian has solved that now by bringing them back to life. They've colorized the album covers, rescued the sound with a solid remastering job, and included a few extras (calling them rarities would just be redundant) from Trimble's stash of unreleased tapes. These records are not for everyone, but if you gravitate toward the eccentrics and misfits of music, they're certainly something you should hear.
