Album of the Week: Three Trapped Tigers – Route One Or Die
Things you would expect from a band called Three Trapped Tigers:
- Ferocity
- Claustrophobia
- There to be, uhhh… three of them.
You will not be disappointed.
The band (Tom, Matt and Adam) have created eight tracks of dense, hard-hitting experimental rock that makes the likes of 65daysofstatic and Battles sound positively conventional in their make-up.
The album title is a complete misnomer. For footy fans, ‘route one’ is the crude, but often effective technique of hoofing it up it up to your strikers and hoping for the best. This album is more akin to Argentinian midfielder Esteban Cambiasso’s 25-pass World Cup goal against Serbian and Montenegro – the most convoluted, roundabout but technically brilliant route to goal you could possibly imagine.
It’s fair to say that the Wombats, these guys most definitely are not. Instead these guys have been playing their own brand of propulsive, ear-battering music for a number of years and only now have managed to get an album out.
There’s slashing guitars, pounding drums and enough time changes to tie you in knots – and that’s just opening track Cramm, available to download for free below.
You can dance to it, mosh to it or just stand around nodding your head, trying to make sense of it all. Noise Trade – sounding like the time when Metallica’s Kirk Hammett played guitar on a version of Orbital’s Satan will also get you twitching.
Appropriately Creepies cranks up the overwhelming sense of dread with hissing feedback and tribal drums. More restrained than the first two tracks, foot firmly off the pedal, its ‘melody’ is the snaking squall of a guitar which reverts to a chime a few minutes in. It’s an astounding piece of music.
Zil is a quieter number, too quiet really, but its pulsing electronica serves a purpose, breaking up the barrage of noise, but the punishing Drebin and Magne return Route One Or Die to business as usual pretty quickly.
Closer Reset teeters on the brink of prog rock, but just about holds back, Overall, the album is a fine example of what we’re supposed to call math rock, but is probably closer to math metal with a dash of dance too.
It’s technically brilliant and hugely listenable fare. Tidal Wave caught up with keysman Tom Rogerson earlier this week…
It seems to have taken a while to get the album out. Good feeling to be releasing it?
Yes, definitely, it took ages and we haven’t played for a while so good to be releasing it and able to play it to people. That’s why we do this right?
All your EP songs titles were simply chronologically order numbers. Was it a deliberate move to step away from this?
Yes. Originally the numbers thing was to stop people asking irrelevant questions about the titles, but it only drew more attention to it. So now that we’ve named the songs, everyone’s asking us about the names.
What does the title refer to? Football??
Whatever!
Can we expect to see you doing festivals over the summer?
Not that many but we’ll see. Quite a few in Europe.
You can download Cramm here with some streaming audio below:
Route One Or Die is out on Monday via Blood and Biscuits and will be available on all good download services.
They’re on tour for the rest of the month too:
Leeds Nation of Shopkeepers, May 25
Preston Mad Ferret, May 26
Bristol Start The Bus, May 27
Meadowlands Festival, May 28
London Cargo, May 31
