As much as we Pitchforkers like to comment on cover art, I just wish it could be ignored right now. A simple hand-scrawl of airplanes at odd angles, while easily dismissed only a week and a half ago, has taken on new significance. Just to clarify: the Trans Megetti aren't insensitive fucks. Their cover art is a few months old, but their rage and devastation sound almost as fresh as our own.
Hailing from the fabulous New Jersey coast, the Trans Megetti put out an album whose name now has similarly awful connotations (1998's Steal the Jet Keys) before releasing Fading Left to Completely On. As refreshingly abstract and association-free as the name is, the music constantly tears open old scars, emotional and musical. With the spacy rip of echoed pick scrapes streaking over a furious punk rock backdrop, the first track, "Rio Nexpa," sounds a bit like At the Drive-In circa two years ago.
Stick around for a few moments, however, and the differences begin to show; Mark Tesi can actually sing, for one thing, and he hits just the right balance of wry desperation, anger, and melody on the chorus ("I can't wait to be over you"). "Trick the Switches" takes things in a slightly more straightforward though still complex direction, relative newcomer Mark Candidi's nimble bass holding the whole thing together. And, with the same biting agility, "Soon Be Seeing You Later" fuses classic rock start/stops straight out of "Magic Bus" with new-school drive and Tesi's forcefully plaintive descending vocals.
Without providing anything revolutionary, the Trans Megetti give enough of themselves to make this sound distinct and worthwhile. The album's high point, the near-poppy "Gina," dares to drop the tempo a bit and lets Julian Grere's alternately stabbing and bitterly legato guitar play around with Candidi's loping bassline. Tesi delivers an acid dissertation on a summer love gone wrong, interlaced with dark imagery ("Both tired of living/ Black dashes on my wrists"), pleading vocal cracks on the chorus, and an ominously chanted final line, "I'll wait for you always."
After that, the quality drops a bit, but there's still quite a bit of good left. "Haircut" moves between chilly riffs and drummer Brian Strahle's stomped-out rhythms and hypnotizing guitar hiss, throwing itself into each but never getting caught up in either. Tesi's vocal urgency propels "On the Monday" with a seething minor-chord intensity, and the song's final tension-releasing instrumental breakdown disperses this energy into the windswept limbo-fragment "Late September."
"Turned On" comes off just a little too bitter, burning through a maze of jumpy guitars and scathingly blunt lyrics ("You don't look so slick/ When you're sucking dick") with only a few sections of melodic saving grace. "Hop the Fence" does a little better with the same basic premise, adding a despairingly melodic chorus and stripping the song down from there. The final track, an acoustic number called "Following," shouldn't work by any means in the context of the rest of the album. However, Tesi's expressive voice (and the cool effect of the background guitar strums and percussion) make it a decent, unpredictably offbeat end to the record.
But then again, sometimes there's no avoiding the cover. What's the point, really, in listening to some kids' comparatively puny sorrows and frustrations at this point in time? You could ask the same question of all sorts of "art" that aim to represent loss and suffering. All I can think of is this: the Trans Megetti don't really try to make anything beautiful. They make it rock, which is a different, half-unknown quality, and that's good enough for me.
