For the entirety of their career, the boys in Caustic Resin have been second class citizens of the indie rock nation. Despite having played on some of Built to Spill's classic LPs, releasing four albums, and crafting some pretty damn good songs, Caustic Resin will forever remain "the second best band in Boise" to all but a handful of rabid Resin fans. Well, if any album were set to shake up these guys' image, it'd be their latest release, Trick Question. Sadly, though, changing your image is not necessarily the same as improving it.
This time around, Caustic Resin take some serious risks by purposefully downplaying most of the elements that tie them back to their contemporary rock brethren. On Trick Question, the band has picked out a set of rules to play by with all the interest and anticipation of a person picking out their clothes for the day. Unfortunately, the musical outlines they choose to follow are the ones for psychedelic stadium rock and early heavy metal-- styles best left to the 1970's.
Although you have to admire the girth of this trio's balls, the end product is blatantly forced and painfully uninspired. Throughout this album, Caustic Resin come off like a Pink Floyd cover band with Tony Iommi on guitars and The Pepsi Girl working the vocals. Heavy, leaden, cliched guitar parts are the focal point f each track, but the band's flashy licks and drawn- out solos more closely resemble the wailing of the damned than Metallica's Master of Puppets.
Yet, true to the spilt nature of this album, Caustic Resin has discovered a way to take the manliest of all music instruments-- the electric guitar-- and rip out all of its muscle. In the meantime, the drumming is simply present, while the band's poor attempts as creativity-- the peppering of pianos, turntables and found sound-- are mediocre at best and laughable at worst. To add to the fun, frontman Brett Nelson's lyrics seem to have been copied straight out of a 9th grader's poetry- infected notebooks.
Topping off this triple layer shitcake are Nelson's vocals. On each of the songs, no matter the tempo, tone, or subject matter, Brett finds new and inventive ways to make his voice as grating as chewing a mouthful of tin foil. I don't know what the guy was thinking when he chose to be a professional singer, but it sure as hell wasn't, "You know, I can really sing." Despite decent tracks like "Nice Wings You've Got There" and "Road Block," Nelson's warble, drenched tactlessly in delay and reverb, destroys any conceivable enjoyment that would have otherwise been extractable. And songs that were bad to begin with-- like "Slide," a six minute, thirty- nine second- long Soundgarden-esque dirge, become un-fucking-bearable.
Trick Question just doesn't fit together, I tell ya. Not in any way, at any time. The polarized nature of the music is interesting (particularly how each song can be as dark and messy as a lump of coal, yet still manage to float lightly around the listener), but it's also stale and uninteresting. If it's meant to be a rock record, it comes off way too hazy to cut the mustard. If it's meant to be a psychedelic record, it's too dumb and heavy- handed for its own good. If it's supposed to sound like this, I don't know what to tell you.
