In the title track A-side, Vanilla Trainwreck tear off a fast-moving blear of jangling guitar, hard-bopping drums, and detached, nearly atonal singing, with the underlying bass-lines as the one piece of firmness to it. The dreamy arrangement makes its assault of electric guitar and drumming work, somehow, trailing off into a feedback fade following the finishing eruption. The band cover a Talking Heads track, “Electric Guitar”, on the B-side, slowing the pace while increasing the audio haze, gradually upping the pressure as they climb towards the end. An odd but pleasing pair, with some underexplored facets of the band on display.
With opening track “Quandry”, Vanilla Trainwreck burst into grungy alt rock with a dusting of shoegaze attitude, with a roar of keyboards or pedaled-up guitar pushing past the chorus-pumping riffs and vocals. On the B-side, “Florida” keeps the general flavoring the same, but shifts to a mellower tempo and almost surf-rocky guitar toning. Quick and lively, with a surprising depth to the song-writing underneath the bluster.
On their third and final album, Machines of Loving Grace simplify the detail-packed electronics of their previous releases in favor of a more metallic approach, with producer Sylvia Massy (who’d handled, among others, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Powerman 5000, and Tool) behind the boards. Though it does bring the beat-poetry-influenced lyrics more to the forefront, the plodding pace of many of the songs makes them feel lacking in subtlety, despite some clever textural adornments and near-seamless combinations of looped and live playing.
While the singing operates in a reduced range of cadences, singer Scott Benzel seems to take that as a challenge to pack the words with dramatic inflection. Though that ends up verging on melodramatic comedy at times, it also meshes with the more apocalyptic flavoring of the songs (e.g., “Solar Temple” and its lyrical push towards consumption, the same for “Last”, with its depressingly unimaginative chorus of ‘This is the last… fucking time! / This is the last time.’, or the junkie resignation of “Casual Users”). It’s not hard to imagine that the band intended to finish their run with this album, given the general themes, but at the same time, societal morbidity had been a persistent presence in previous LPs as well.
Maybe the most reminiscent of their previous albums is “Twofold Godhead”, an exercise in distortion, with chunk-cut vocal processing flanging back and forth while guitars are sent through banks of delay and echo, spoken samples are beat against the rhythm, and the keyboards swirl up a storm. Unfortunately, it’s something of a stand-alone in the album, and feels a bit like a frustrated anti-single. Though it’s certainly a mixed bag, the album does (for the most part) show the band’s character, just through a sharply different form than the rest of their work.
Scrambled Brains 