It's tempting and intriguing, but ultimately reductive, to hear Black Sunday's Tronic Blanc as a reaction to the collapse last year of Memphis up-and-comers the Lost Sounds. First, there's the name Black Sunday: Whether it refers to Thomas Harris (who wrote a novel of that name about a blimp crash) or to the Great Depression (a tremendous dust storm obliterated millions of acres on Sunday, April 14, 1935), the phrase evokes immense disaster, widespread destruction, and an aftermath of funereal grief.
Then there's the fact the Black Sunday is essentially Alicja Trout, who previously sang and played keyboards and guitars for the Lost Sounds and has recorded with various one-off lineups and incarnations, including the Clears, the River City Tan Lines, the Fitts, and, most recently, Mouse Rocket. Aside from a few guest musicians (including former Lost Sound Jay Lindsay, who plays drums on two songs), Trout plays all the instruments and wrote all but one of the songs, so Tronic Blanc (which she recorded in her Memphis studio, called Tronic Graveyard) sounds like her most solo album-- and, in some ways, the best realization of her unique aesthetic.
As such, Tronic Blanc's technofear and paranoia-- not to mention its jaded resentment-- can be attributed solely to Trout. "First, I cut my arms for you/ Then I cut my scars for you," she sings on "Torture Torture", with an immediacy that's chilling. Most of this personal angst surfaces in clone imagery-- not genetic regenerations, but mechanical substitutes. Songs like "Torture Torture", "This Heart Is Now Aluminum", and "Modulated Simulated" voice a very specific fear: That some enormous upheaval, like a bad break-up, will so overwhelm her that she might lose her emotional faculties and become a cold, metal-hearted machine.
This panic is reflected in the music on Tronic Blanc, which pits live instrumentation against synthetic noises. On "What I Think Is Wrong", live drums compete with meowing keyboards, while on "You're Gonna See Me", real guitars counter canned beats. But Trout complicates that tension by making the drums sound preternaturally rigid and the guitars electronically sculpted, while her keyboard runs-- which have been a trademark at least since her days with the Clears (their one album is well worth seeking out and prefigures the current New Wave revival by almost a decade)-- often give the songs their heartbeat pulse. The line between the actual and the artificial constantly blurs, mirroring her confusion over real and false emotions. In a sense, Trout is Dr. Frankenstein and Tronic Blanc is the monster she's created in her studio lab.
But complicating that literary comparison is the simple and overwhelming fact that despite the pain and fear the songs convey, Trout's music is exuberant, inventive, and full-to-bursting with ideas. As with previous projects, Trout's preferred m.o. is the restless, reckless conflation of genres: songs like "This Heart Is Now Aluminum", "Modulated Simulated", and "Little Bird" beat with garage-rock swagger and taut new wave grooves, while "Destroy Everything in Your Path" and "Next Girl Detour", with its shout-out chorus, swing with surf guitar momentum. Elsewhere, the DIY aesthetic lends "Little Bird" and "On the Way Downtown"-- about the dangers of the Mississippi River-- their rough immediacy, as if Trout recorded them as soon as the ideas popped into her head. All these elements belie the grim undertones of Tronic Blanc, suggesting that simple expression can be not only catharsis, but a powerful defense against the dehumanizing disappointments of other people.
