god save us dreamers, yr all that’s left sometimes / god save you dreamers, yr all that’s left in life
for anyone interested in underground / outsider music bobb trimble’s first two records are one of thee touchstones. a singular vision. song as solipsism. both merged into one. forget walking in his shooze, this’s like sliding around inside his goddam skull. aesthetic tendrils you can trace all the way from him to james ferraro and gary war and ariel pink. a sometimes inscrutable mix of mystic and personal, one that requires decoding of sigils and myths and personal mandalas. y’know, unravelling the contents of a fella’s head.
not to make out his is some obscurist works, deliberately obfuscated and over-intellectualised by the listener. nah, this is one guy’s dream of being a beatle, it’s noise informed by queen and bowie and elo. the otherness never smothers the pop, the singer/songwriter gloop at the core of bobb’s records. no matter how scarred with fx and how wonky the production / psychology, his records are unerringly human.
this follow-up to iron curtain innocence and harvest of dreams has languished unreleased for nearly thirty years. all the original pressings somewhat (un)predictably tossed into trash by the man hisself. this is a kinda different beast to the first two. less muzzy abstract, less eggshell fragile, i dunno less obsessed over i guess. less of what his friend/manager/bassist kris thompson describes as chasing glass menagerie fantasies of perfection. there’s a gnarly immediacy to crippled dog band. thanks no doubt to the crippled dog band themselves – essentially a buncha rowdy local kids led by bobb.
not the first time he’d channeled youth into naïfish lostboys energy. iron curtain innocence is dedicated to: children of a dynasty destined to ruins who build their dreams on the darkness they buy and steal. harvest of dreams has another gang of kids scattered throughout. but crippled dog is the first time all that spontaneity’s been captured properly on tape. hell it sounds more like a live jam than a proper record. an almost shaggs-like boisterous amateurishness / innocence, specially on all together now which sounds like the minutemen mangling lennon/mccartney.
s’pose you could class this as somewhat conceptual. a dark teenageboy utopia of video game war and rock and roll apocalypse. bookended by arcade samples. upping the tempo. adolescent proto-metal crunch. some righteous fuzz guitar in amongst his usual flanged to buggery six string aquatics. and this simplicity seems to have assuaged somewhat the sadness, the aloneness, the anxiety. like all dreamers, i mistook disenchantment for truth said ol’ jean-paul sartre. well there’s an optimism at work here, mainly expressed through the simple joy of bashing out a song, fast, loud. the transcendental nature (which’s always been there) of the possible. it’s the most fun of his albums taking in as it does balladeering, stoopid garage stomp, proggy gallumphing and nuggets/pebbles inner cosmic strammash.
yeah rough and ready and raw and more straightforwardly lovable for it. still that sense of jungian strangeness amongst the all-over-the-shop holler, chatter and clatter so it’s still recognizably a bobb trimble album but a beautifully (il)logical progression. a little sad that it still feels like his swansong but so damned happy it’s finally out there.
