Once I had a keyboard. A little Casio keyboard. It had cheap plastic drum pads and goofy preprogrammed "computer" sounds. Unfortunately, I had to give it back to the kid I borrowed it from, but while the fun lasted, I got a huge kick out of its 100-instrument tone-bank. And from the sound of it, Trans Am did, too. Their new Japanese b-sides collection, You Can Always Get What You Want, employs that same preprogrammed Casio "computer" patch as the primary structure for the opening track, "American Kooter."
Essentially, the track, which originally appeared in nine-minute studio form on their excellent self-titled 1995 debut, is a demo of all the cool sounds that very Casio can generate. The buzzing "airplane" sound, the emergency faux-"ambulance" siren, the "piano"-- it's all here in tinny, distorted glory, backed by a thunderous drum section and confused bass line. And though the track's low-fidelity epileptic funk is powerful enough to move crowds of uptight, arty Chicago scenesters, "American Kooter" remains both one of the band's least inspired songs to date.
You Can Always Get What You Want assembles 65 minutes of Trans Am's massive catalog of import-only and previously unreleased tracks, and opens and closes with live performances. The first three songs, "American Kooter," "Simulacrum" and "Man-Machine," are culled from a 1993 EP on UK-based SKAM records, and were recorded live at the Cave in Chapel Hill, North Carolina during that summer. But regardless of the fact that these are some of the band's earliest recordings, they're performed with an intensity that the band has rarely been able to achieve on subsequent studio albums-- guitars pick on frayed nerve-endings, hi-hats click with robotic precision, and crowd cheers reverberate in drunken frenzies. Strangely, the album's final tracks-- live versions of four songs from 1996's Surrender to the Night, recorded that fall at Washington, D.C.'s Black Cat-- are much closer to their studio counterparts and considerably less engaging.
The majority of this record is composed of lost studio cuts yanked from the several hard-to-find releases of Trans Am lore-- a 1995 Strength Magazine split 7", Tuba Frenzy #3, the rare Australian comp In Flux Us-- alongside stray vault tracks like the beautifully haywire "Nazi/Hippie Empire," a chopped-up "Party Mix" of Futureworld's "Am Rhein," and the ambient, kraut-inflected "Monica's Story." It's during these tracks that Trans Am provide fans with their most promising music to date, and hopefully, foreshadow future albums.
Despite this compilation's general lack of cohesiveness and its seemingly aimless live closers, You Can Always Get What You Want hits more than it misses. And in the end, it fulfills its purpose to save fans hundreds of dollars on overseas postage and import mark-ups. No longer will Trans Am junkies tirelessly search eBay in hopes of encountering a $30 copy of the band's Illegal Ass 12" or scrounge through racks of disorganized 7"s in New York record stores. If you're looking for a place to start with these guys, though, go for their 1995 debut or 1998's The Surveillance.
